Hans Jean Arp

Hans Arp (1886–1966) can justly be called the father of twentieth-century abstract sculpture, an artist whose impact traversed countless early modernist avant-gardes, from Dada and Surrealism to Concrete art. Arp’s sculptures, in all their wondrous morphous plasticity, lend themselves ideally to such varied assimilation, and also--less happily--to forgery. In recent years, some controversy has arisen as to the authenticity of several Arp works, as a number of imitations have circulated in the art market. This substantial publication, undertaken by the independent scholars Arie Hartog and Kai Fischer, decisively counters the problem by assembling all of the authenticated examples of every one of Arp’s known sculptures and bringing their respective status up to date. An introductory essay describes the posthumous history of Hans Arp’s oeuvre.

German-French sculptor, painter and poet Jean Arp (1886-1966) is one of the most important pioneers of twentieth-century nonfigurative art. A founder of the Zurich and Cologne Dada movements, a key Surrealist and Constructivist and later a founder of the Paris Abstraction-Création movement, he was always at the forefront of his era's evolving avant-gardes. His work was by turns powerful, organic, anthropomorphic, biomorphic, geometric, coincidental and formal, evoking "the natural process of compression, hardening, of coagulation, of thickening, of growing together." In general, Arp preferred not to talk about his abstractions, citing the fact that sculptural forms in nature do not illustrate, but rather paraphrase and produce concrete forms themselves. He did not want to work according to nature, but like nature. This beautifully produced volume, which documents the complete range of Arp's artistic and poetic oeuvre, is published on the occasion of the opening of Germany's Arp Museum extension, designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning New York architect Richard Meier. The new panel-and-glass Modernist extension is situated high atop a bank of the Rhine River, accessible by an innovative subterranean passageway connected to a monumental elevator that cuts through the heavily wooded hillside below the museum.