HANS, JEAN ARP, quotes by the artist on creating sculpture, Concrete Art and the meaning of Dada in his life; + biography stories
Hans, Jean Arp (1886 – 1966), his quotes and comments on his artistic life in Dada and in French Surrealism, his idea of Concrete Art, more biography facts and on his creation of sculptures. Arp was famous for his abstract Dada and later Surrealist sculpture art. He created moreover great other art: poems, paintings, Dadaist collages with Kurt Schwitters and print-art with his wife Sophie Tauber. Arp produced also a lot of great art-statements in his many writings and articles. Arp created frequently together with his wife Sophie Arp Tauber and Kurt Schwitters, what matched with his opinion that art should be . Arp was a founding member of early Dada; later he participated in French Surrealism.
* At the bottom more biography facts, life stories & useful art links for Hans / Jean Arp. – editor, Fons Heijnsbroek
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Hans, Jean Arp, his quotes on Dada, sculpture and concrete art + his life and biography stories
– ‘Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man’s vanity to be loathsome.’
* Arp’s art statement on the human being and creation of art: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, – this book gathers almost all Arp’s work in prose and some important poetry -, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 315
– ‘I wanted to find another order, another value for man in nature. He should no longer be the measure of all things, nor should everything be compared with him, but, on the contrary, all things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure. I wanted to create new appearances, to extract new forms from man. This is made clear in my objets from 1917.’
* Hans / Jean Arp’s art quote on his artist life in Dada, around 1917: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 183
– ‘We do not wish to copy nature. We do not want to reproduce, we want to produce. We want to produce as a plant produces a fruit and does not itself reproduce. We want to produce directly and without meditation. As there is not the least trace of abstraction in this art, we will call it concrete art.’
* Hans Arp’s statement on Dada art and his famous idea of Concrete Art “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 183
– ‘These works (of other artists as Otto van Rees, shown in an exhibition in the Tanner Gallery in Zurich in 1915, fh) are constructed with lines, with surfaces, with shapes, with colors which try to attain, beyond the merely human, the infinite and the eternal. They negate our egoism… …the hands of our brothers, instead of serving us as if they were our own, have become the hands of the enemy. Celebrity and the masterpiece have replaced anonymity…’
* Hans / Jean Arp, quote around 1915: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 183
– ‘These painting, these sculptures – these objects – should remain anonymous, in the great workshop of nature, like the clouds, the mountains, the seas, the animals, and man himself. Yes! Man should go back to nature! Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages. In 1915, O. van Rees, A.C. van Rees (both were great Dutch painters, fh), Freundlich, S. Tauber (his future wife, fh) and I myself made an attempt of this sort.’
* Arp’s Dada art statement on the necessary anonymous character of modern art: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 183
– ‘A painting or sculpture not modeled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone… … (but) it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses… ..art must be like) fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant or a child in it’s mother’s womb.’ (ca. 1930)
* Hans Arp’s famous art statement on creating art, growing like fruit or a child: “Abstract Art”, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 113
– I like nature but not its substitutes. Naturalist art, illusionism, is a substitute for nature. I remember that in arguing with Mondrian (in Paris 1920s, fh), he opposed art to nature saying that art is artificial and nature is natural. I do not share this opinion. I do not think that nature is in natural opposition to art. Art’s origins are natural.
* Hans Arp’s artist quote on the close relation between art and nature: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 359
– Actually, it was in Paris in 1914 that I did my first collages, for an occultist friend (for the Theosophic Institute in Paris, fh.) They were mysterious porticos which were supposed to replace mural paintings and which evoked the structure of palm branches or fish-bones (remark on his first collages in different materials, fh).
* Hans / Jean Arp’s biography quote on creating early collage in Paris: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 430
– …These collages (he made in 1914, fh) were static symmetrical constructions, porticos with pathetic vegetation, the gateway to the realm of dreams. They were done with colored paper in black, orange or blue dye plates. Although cubist painting interested me very much, not a trace of their influence was to be found in my collages.
* Hans / Jean Arp’s art quote on his early collage: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 420
– We painted embroidered and made collages. All these works were drawn from the simplest forms and were probably the first examples of concrete art. These works are realities pure and independent with no meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected all mimesis and description, giving free reign to the elementary and spontaneous. (ca. 1916, remark on his cooperation with his future wife Sophie Täuber)
* Hans / Jean Arp, biography quote on creating art with his wife Sophie Tauber: “Abstract Art”, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p.65
– the streams buck like rams in a tent.
whips crack and from the hills come the crookedly combed
shadows of the shepherds.
black eggs and fools’ bells fall from the trees.
thunder drums and kettledrums beat upon the ears of the
donkeys.
wings brush against flowers.
fountains spring up in the eyes of the wild boar.
* Hans / Jean Arp, Dada poetry line: line from Arp’s poem ‘Der Vogel Selbdritt’, Hans Arp; first published in 1920; “Gesammelte Gedichte I”, p. 41 (transl. Herbert Read); in “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs,”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 288
– Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While guns rumbled in the distance, we (Dada) sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men’s minds.
* Hans / Jean Arp, artist statement on the origin of early Dada in Zurich and the meaning of Dadaism in his early artistic life: “Dadaland”, 1938
– In the good times of Dada, we detested polished works, the distracted air of spiritual struggle, the titans, and we rejected them with all out being.
* Hans Arp, biography quote: his story on the start of Dada: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 307
– Dada was given the Venus of Milo a clyster and has allowed the Laocoön and his sons to rest awhile, after thousands of years of struggle with the good sausage Python. The philosophers are of less use to Dada than an old toothbrush, and it leaves them on the scrap heap for the great leaders of the world.
* Hans / Jean Arp, artist famous quote on the meaning of Dada: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 63
– Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.
* Hans / Jean Arp, quote on the meaning and intention of early Dada for human life: “Abstract Art”, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 66
– Whatever became of Kurt Schwitters novel ‘Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling’ [ Franz Müller’s Wire Spring ] several chapters of which we composed together? Is it buried under the bomb ruins of is house on Waldhausenstrasse in Hannover? For hours, Schwitters and I sat together and spun dialogue, in rhapsody. He took these writings and channelled them into his novel… …We sat together again, writing ‘Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling’:
H. A.: The nightingales have had enough of your hymnal Karagösen. Play violin on parrots, but avoid the women red hood ans snow widow.
K. Schw.: Should I pe-trify something for you? Or would you like play cry together?
H. A.: Should we wash our tears or drown them?
K. Schw.: You are a sipsnipper, Since when do your diamonds bark?
H. A.: The water is getting hard. A fruit cries out loud and gives birth to a fish.
K. Schw.: I’ll p-ut it in the sea, or should I st-ab you wth it?
source of Arp’s / Schwitters biography quote in dialogue: ‘Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling – Memories of Kurt Schwitters’, Hans Arp 1956; as quoted in “I is Style”, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, commissioned by Rudi Fuchs, director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, pp. 139-140
– Then we went down to his work room, in the horrible beautiful Merz grotto, where broken wheels paired with matchboxes, wire lattices with brushes without bristles, rusted wheels with curious Merz cucumbers… …How often did we ‘p-lay’ in this room! Schwitters called playing, considering the sweat, working. There we glued together our paper pictures,, and as I tossed away one of my glued-together works one morning, Schwitters asked, ‘You don’t like it? Can I have it?’ – ‘What do you want with this failed piece of toast?’ Schwitters took a good look at it and said, ‘I’ll put what’s on top on the bottom, I’ll stick a little Merz nose in this corner and I’ll sign the bottom Kurt Schwitters.’ And, yes indeed, this collage became a wonderful picture by Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters was a wizard, just as Hokusai was a wizard…
source of Arp’s biography quote on the frequent artist collaboration with Kurt Schwitters in his Dada life: ‘Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling – Memories of Kurt Schwitters’, Hans Arp 1956; as quoted in “I is Style”, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, commissioned by Rudi Fuchs, director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, NAI Publishers, Rotterdam 2000, pp. 140-141
– It was Sophie ( Sophie Arp Tauber, woman artist; later in his life she became Arp’s wife, fh) who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium.
* Hans / Jean Arp, biography quote on the influence of the art of his wife Sophie Tauber: ‘Unsern täglichen Traum’, Hans Arp; p. 76; as quoted in “Arp”, ed. Serge Fauchereau, Ediciones Poligrafa, S. A., Barcelona 1988, p. 11
– Already in 1915, Sophie Tauber divides the surface of her aquarelles into squares and rectangles which she then juxtaposes horizontally and perpendicularly as Mondrian, Itten and Paul Klee did in the same period, fh). She constructs them as if they were masonry work. The colors are luminous, ranging from the raw yellow to deep red or blue.
* Hans / Jean Arp, artist quote on the geometry character of the watercolor art by his wife Sophie Tauber: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 288
– A deep and serene silence filled her (Sophie’s, fh) structures composed of colors and surfaces. The exclusive use of horizontal and vertical rectangular planes in the work of art, the extreme simplification, exerted a decisive influence on my work. Here I found, stripped down to the limit, the essential elements of all earthly constructions: the bursting, upward surge of the lines and the planes toward the sky, the verticality of pure life, and the vast equilibrium, the sheer horizontality and expansiveness of dreamlike peace. Her work was for me a symbol of a divinely built ‘house’ which man in his vanity has ravaged and sullied (Arp’s remark on the early art of Sophie Tauber, whom he married later, fh).
* Hans / Jean Arp, artist quote on the geometry character of the watercolor art, created by his wife Sophie Tauber: “Abstract Painting”, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 58
– In 1915 Sophie Tauber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper (without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting, fh). These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous.
* Hans / Jean Arp quote on the early cooperation in creating art together with Sophie Tauber: “The Art of Jean Arp”, Herbert Read, Abrams, New York 1968, p.p. 34, 38
– As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface… .Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface.
* Hans / Jean Arp, quote on drawing on the black surface: Hans Hofmann in “Search for the Real, Hans Hofmann”, Addison Gallery of modern Art, 1948
– I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, fh) because their attitude revolted against ‘art’ and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada’s. (1929)
* Hans / Jean Arp’s biography quote on his story with the great Surrealists in Paris: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Paris 1966, p. 406
– In recent times (around 1930, fh), Surrealist painters have used descriptive illusionistic academic methods (critic on surrealists as Magritte and Dali, fh)
* Hans / Jean Arp, critical statement on the great Surrealists artists around 1930: a letter to Jan Brzekowski, co-publisher of the Franco-Polish magazine: ‘L’art contemporain'; as quoted in “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 63
– I use very little red. I use blue, yellow, a little green, but especially… …black, white and grey. There is a certain need in me for communication with human beings. Black and white is writing (1955).
* Hans / Jean Arp, art quote on using colors: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris, p. 288
– Like the disposition of planes, the proportion of these planes and their colors seemed to depend only upon chance, and I declared that these works were ordered ‘according to the law of chance’, just like in the order of nature.
* Hans / Jean Arp, famous statement on the proportion of the planes in his art and the role of chance “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 307
– Ever since my childhood, I was haunted by the search for perfection. An imperfectly cut paper literally made me ill, I would guillotine it. My collages came undone, they became blistered. I then introduced death and decay in my compositions. I reacted (around 1932, fh) by avoiding any precision from one day to another. Instead of cutting the paper, I would tear it with my hands.
* Hans Arp’s artist quote on perfection and his reaction by destruction: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, 1966, p. 431
– At daybreak I found on my sculptor’s turntable a little mischievous form (small plaster form of Impish Form, made in 1949, fh), alert and somewhat obese, with a stomach like a lute. It seemed to me like an imp. I called it that. And all of a sudden one day this little character, this imp, through a Venezuelan medium, found itself to be the father of a giant (he enlarged it, fh). This giant son resembles its father like an egg resembles another egg, a fig another fig, a bell another bell.
* Hans Arp, art statemement on enlargement in his sculpture art: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 431
– I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born, I have confidence in it (automatic painting, fh). I do not think about it. The forms arrive pleasant, or strange, hostile, inexplicable, mute, or drowsy. They are born from themselves. It seems to me as if all I do is move my hands.
* Hans / Jean Arp’s famous statement on ‘automatic painting / drawing, sculpting etc..: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 307
– Each one of these bodies ( works he made, fh) certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.
* Hans Arp, his quote on the relation between meaning of and naming his art: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, 1966, p. 383
– To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.
* Hans / Jean Arp, quote on joy in life, in creating art: a late remark by Hans Arp made in Galerie Denise René in 1962, this quote is also the last line in the art book “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 571
Hans Jean Arp: his not sourced art quotes by the Dada artist on sculpture art
– Art is a fruit that grows in man. (short great quote b Hans / Jean Arp)
– The cynicism of Dadaists is a mask. (Arp, short quote on Dada)
– Dada is for dreams, colourful paper masks, kettledrums, sound poems, concretions, poem statistics, for things that are not far from picking flowers and making bouquets. (art quote, Hans / Jean Arp)
– Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation, tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like grey vegetation. (art statement of Hans Arp)
Hans Jean Arp, biography and life facts of the Dada artist, poet and sculptor
Hans Arp /Jean Arp was a famous German-French artist in the Dada art movement. He became sculptor, painter, poet and a founding member of early Dada in Switzerland and Germany. Arp wanted to achieve an art which was highly anonymous, general and impersonal, as appeared in his art-cooperation with the great Dadaist artist Kurt Schwitters (see Arp’s quotes). As a consequence of this art-option Arp made also a lot of collage and graphic-art together with Sophie Arp-Taeuber, whom he married in 1922.
After his Dada involvement Hans / Jean Arp engaged himself with French Surrealism and lived and worked in Paris and in Zurich with his wife. Between 1927 and 1929 both stayed in Strasbourg where they cooperated with Theo van Doesburg in his architectural ‘Aubette’ project. It was Ellsworth Kelly, the American Hard Edge artist who visited the Arp’s a lot in Paris during the war. So the young American artist Kelly got encouraged in his new developing Hard Edge art-ideas by the European artists Hans Arp and Sophie Tauber!
Hans Jean Arp, links for more biography and life facts & information for his sculpture art in pictures
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* life & art statements by Dada artist Hans / Jean Arp, in Dutch language
