Jean Arp

Born in Strasbourg in 1886, from an Alsatian mother and a German father, Jean Arp spends the first twenty years of his life between Strasbourg and Weggis beside Lucerne, intersected with stays in Paris, Weimar and Berlin. He maintains very early intense contacts with the artists who seek to free themselves from the traditional forms of art. In 1910, it melts with his friend Walter Helbig “DER Modern Bund”. In 1912, it meets Kandinsky. “Its workshop, word, form and color amalgamated themselves and transformed themselves into worlds fabulous, amazing, ever seen”. Arp collaborates in the Almanac of Blaue Reiter and exposes with Delaunay, the Falconer, Franz Marc and Paul Klee. Neither painting nor sculpture, the few eight hundred reliefs which Arp produced, cofounder of the movement hobby-horse, were generated by him “according to laws of fate's”, like nature plastician, fluid and ductile, gives birth to its forms indefinitely. Breaking by the denial of humour with the ascending romantic one of surrealist, Arp releases here the unconscious one of its too pressing and too literary oneiric load. Instead of proceeding to the setting at the day of images resulting from obscure forces, and although being declared inspired by the major sources of the natural genesis, this poetic cosmology has initially as a function to produce, in a purging of imaginary, anti-direction (Gegensinn): the paramount one in on this side same of any primitivism. The unconscious one becomes concrete among us, objectified per as many “fetishes” to material and cutting Nets and polished. Very other then is the philosophy of the dream, a future opens to the sleeper who, with his half-sleep, on the edge of his alarm clock, surrounds himself by images become small concretions, “fruits of unconscious”, according to a onirism laid out in orchard of a new life.