Jean Arp | Grothcollection

Jean Arp, Hans Arp (1887-1966), German-French sculptor, painter and poet. Jean Arp was a central figure in early European avant-garde art. He was born in Strasbourg, was educated here and in Weimar and from 1908 in Paris, where he met artists such as Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, Wassely Kandinsky and Max Ernst and the poets Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob.

Under 1. World War Jean Arp settled in Zurich, where in 1916 he founded the Dada movement together with, among others, the poets Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball and the visual artist Sophie Taeuber, whom he married in 1922.

Arp then worked with poems, paper collages and polychrome wooden reliefs, often in collaboration with Sophie Taeuber. He followed the Dadaists into the surrealist movement and became one of its leading artists in 1920s Paris.

In 1930 he joined the group Cercle et Carré (from 1931 Abstraction-Création), and at the same time he began to perform purely abstract sculptures in plaster, bronze and marble on themes such as "human concretion" and "metamorphosis".

With simple abstract forms, the sculptures concretize the epitome of growth and gross power in the burgeoning organic life, and they visualize Arp's own words about art as a fruit that grows in man.

Alongside the sculptures that stand as his main effort, Jean Arp continued his work on collages and paintings, often composed in a tight geometric idiom. He carried out several large decoration tasks, i.a. a relief in front of the UNESCO building in Paris (1957). In Denmark, several of his works can be found in Louisiana.