Jean arp

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Jean (Hans) Arp (Strasbourg, September 16, 1887 - Basel, June 7, 1966) was a Franco-German sculptor, poet and painter. He was one of the founders of Dadaism.

Biography

He was born in Strasbourg, during the brief period following the Franco-Prussian War, when the area was known as Alsace-Lorraine, after it had been returned to Germany by France. When the territory was reincorporated into France at the end of World War I, French law determined that the name of the territory would be Jean and not Hans .

In 1904, after attending the School of Arts and Crafts in Strasbourg, he went to Paris, where he first published his poetry. From 1905 to 1907 he studied at the Kunstschule (Art School) in Weimar and in 1908 he returned to Paris where he attended the Académie Julian .

In 1915 he moved to Switzerland, to take advantage of Swiss neutrality. Arp later told the story of how, when he was notified that he was to report to the German embassy, he avoided being drafted into the army: he took the paperwork he was given and, in the first space, wrote the date. Then he put the date in all the other blank spaces, then drew a line under it and carefully added it up. He then took off all his clothes and marched with the papers in his hand. They told him to go home.

Arp was a founding member of the Dada movement in Zurich in 1916. In 1920, as Hans Arp, along with Max Ernst, and the social activist Alfred Grünwald, he established himself in the Cologne Dada group. However, in 1925 his work also appeared in the first exhibition of the Surrealist group at the Galerie Pierre in Paris.

From this same year is his book, jointly with El Lissitzky on «Isms in art».

Arp combines the techniques of automatism and oneiric techniques in the same work, developing an iconography of organic forms that has come to be called biomorphic sculpture, in which an attempt is made to represent the organic as a formative principle of reality. His poetry is included in the Surrealist movement.

In 1926 Arp moved to the Paris suburb of Meudon. In 1931 he broke with the Surrealist movement and founded Abstraction-Creation, working with this Parisian group and editing in the magazine Transition .

From the 1930s until his death he wrote and published essays and poetry. In 1942 he fled from his home in Meudon to escape the German occupation and lived in Zurich until the end of the war.

Arp visited New York in 1949 to present a solo show at the Buchholz Gallery. In 1950 he was offered to create a relief for the Graduate Center of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts and commissioned the mural for the Unesco building in Paris. In 1954 Arp won the Grand Prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale.

In 1958 a retrospective show of his work was presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which was followed by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris in 1962.

The Musée d'D'art moderne et contemporain in Strasbourg preserves many of his paintings and sculptures.

Arp died in Basel.