Jean Arp

Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp, known in English as Jean Arp, was a German-French sculptor, painter, and poet associated with Dada and abstract art. He was born in Strasbourg on 16 September 1886 to a French mother and a German father, during the period when Alsace–Lorraine was under German control. After World War I, the region reverted to France, and French law required him to adopt a French name; he legally became Jean Arp, though he still used "Hans" when speaking German. He died on 7 June 1966.

Arp began his artistic training at the École des Arts et Métiers in Strasbourg, then moved to Paris in 1904 to publish his first poetry. From 1905 to 1907 he studied at the Weimarer Kunstschule in Germany, where he met his uncle, landscape painter Carl Arp. He returned to Paris in 1908 to attend the Académie Julian. In 1911 he co-founded the Moderne Bund, the first modern art alliance in Switzerland, and exhibited with them until 1913. The following year he visited Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, who encouraged his work, and Arp exhibited with the Der Blaue Reiter group. Later in 1912 he participated in a major Zürich exhibition alongside Henri Matisse, Robert Delaunay, and Kandinsky. In Berlin in 1913, dealer and editor Herwarth Walden, a key figure in the European avant-garde, took him up.

To avoid military service during World War I, Arp moved to Switzerland in 1915, exploiting its neutrality. When summoned to the German consulate in Zürich, he feigned mental illness: he crossed himself whenever he saw a portrait of Paul von Hindenburg, then wrote his birth date on every line of a form and calculated their sum. The authorities believed him. That same year he met artist Sophie Taeuber at an exhibition; she became his collaborator and a major influence on his style. They married on 20 October 1922.

In 1916 Hugo Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich, which became the hub of Dada activity for a group including Arp, Marcel Janco, and Tristan Tzara. In 1920 Arp, Max Ernst, and Alfred Grünwald founded the Cologne Dada group. His work appeared in the first Surrealist group exhibition at the Galérie Pierre in Paris in 1925.

Arp moved to Meudon, a Paris suburb, in 1926. He broke with Surrealism in 1931 to help found Abstraction-Création, collaborating with that Paris-based group and the periodical *Transition*. During the 1930s he expanded from collage, assemblage (such as *Trousse d'un Da*, 1921), and bas-relief into bronze and stone sculpture, producing small works with multiple elements that viewers could pick up, separate, and rearrange. He also wrote and published essays and poetry throughout the 1930s and the rest of his life. In 1942 he fled Meudon to escape German occupation, living in Zürich until the war ended.

International recognition came in 1949 with a solo exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery in New York City. In 1950 he was commissioned to create a relief for Harvard University Graduate Center and later a mural for the UNESCO building in Paris. Arthur and Madeleine Lewja of Galerie Chalette became his New York representatives in the late 1950s, helping establish his reputation in America. A retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York followed in 1958, and another at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1962. In 1972 the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited works from the Lejwa collection and pieces lent by his widow, Marguerite Arp. That show, expanded as “Arp 1877–1966,” traveled to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and then to seven U.S. and six Australian museums. In 1986 the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein of Stuttgart organized “The Universe of Jean Arp,” a 150-piece exhibition that concluded an international six-city tour at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.