Torse-gerbe

Arp's Dada and Surrealist works in relief led him to begin sculpting in the round. From these early experiments he began to fashion his shapes from a curve or a contrast that inspired him, nurturing it until he felt satisfied that there was nothing more to change. The female figure first appears in Arp's sculpture with Torso (1931; Read, no. 90), a small marble with a serpentine curve to the spine and no suggestion of legs. Arp refined the concept over the next two decades, adding forms that simulated female thighs. As Eduard Trier notes "The sculptures of the last years are a continuation, enriched by variation and mutation, of Jean Arp's work from the beginning...Arp's figures are always torsos. The language of his form demands this--it knows no extremities. A display of subtlety, gesticulating forms that express some ingenious idea would certainly have been anathema to him. Arp only knows the torso, but as a fragment of something originally whole. The torso becomes an independant complete form" (op. cit., pp. ix and xi). Torse-gerbe was conceived in 1958, and in 1959 he created a larger 56 inch (142.3 cm.) version (see Christie's, New York, sale 14 May 1999, lot 633). It's silhouette re-affirms the female figure with its voluptuous shape and fluid line. The poetic title, which translates "Torso-sheaf", further underscores the symbiosis of the human form with another of his favorite source of inspiration, the organic form.