Arp, Jean

(1887-1966)

   sculptor

   An avant-garde sculptor, painter, and poet, Jean Arp was born in Strasbourg and studied art in Paris and Weimar, then later painted in Switzerland for a number of years. By 1912, he had become associated with the Blue Rider (Der Blaue Reiter) group of experimental artists in Munich. During World War I, he found refuge in Zurich, Switzerland, where he helped launch the revolutionary dadaist movement with such artists as Ball, Janco, Huelsenbeck, and Tzara. By 1917, Arp's own style of art had evolved to the abstract and curvilinear forms that characterized his later work. in 1924, in Paris, he became associated with the surrealists and their style and began producing painted wooden bas-reliefs and cut-cardboard constructions. By the 1930s, he was working in freestanding carved and molded sculpture in various substances. An example is his biomorphic form Human Construction (1935). He has also worked in collage and gouache, as well as lithography and engraving. A poet and essayist, Arp, recalling his bilingual Alsatian background, referred to himself as both "Jean" and "Hans." In 1921, he married Sophie Taeuber, a Swiss artist and one of the earliest painters of geometric abstraction.