(1887-1966)
Arp was first affiliated with the Surrealists and later with abstract artists. In the 1920
he joined the French vanguard and the Dada movement. His won international acclaim from
his sculptures in stone.
ARP'S THOUGHTS ON ART
"We don't want to copy nature. We don't want to reproduce, we want to produce. We want to produce like a plant that produces a fruit, and not reproduce. We want to produce directly and not by way of any intermediary. Since this art doesn't have the slightest trace of abstraction, we name It concrete art. Works of concrete art should not be signed by the artists. These paintings, sculptures-these objects-should remain anonymous in the huge studio of nature, like clouds, mountains, seas, animals, men. Yes! Men should go back to nature! Artists should work in communities as they did in the Middle Ages."
"These works are constructed with
lines, surfaces, forms, and colors that try to go beyond the human and attain the infinite
and the eternal. They reject our egotism.... The hands of our brothers, instead of being
interchangeable with our own hands, have become enemy hands. Instead of anonymity, we have
renown and masterpieces; wisdom is dead.... Reproduction is imitation, play acting,
tightrope walking."
"The Renaissance bumptiously exalted human reason. Modern times with their science and technology have turned man into a megalomaniac. The atrocious chaos of our era is the consequence of that overrating of reason." The evolution of traditional painting toward concrete art, from Cdzanne by way of the Cubists, has been frequently explained, and these historical explanations have merely confused the issue. All at once, "according to the laws of chance," around 1914, the human mind underwent a transformation:it was confronted with an ethical problem. When I exhibited my first concrete reliefs, I put out a little manifesto declaring the art of the bourgeois to be sanctioned lunacy. Especially these naked men, women, and children in stone or bronze, exhibited in public squares, gardens, and forest clearings, who untiringly dance, chase butter-flies, shoot arrows, hold out apples, blow the flute, are the perfect expression of a mad world. These mad figures must no longer sully nature. Today, as in the day of the early Christians, the essential must become known. The artist must let his work create itself directly. Today we are no longer concerned with subtleties. My reliefs and sculptures fit naturally into nature.On closer examination however they reveal that they were formed by human hand, and so I have named certain of them: Stone Formed by Human Hand."
[e. 1942]
SOME JEAN APR LINKS The Artchive.com The National Gallery of Art.gov University of Wisconsin