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Lot Essay
'I allow myself to be guided by the work at the time of its birth, I have confidence in it. I don't reflect. The forms come, pleasing or strange, hostile, inexplicable, dumb or drowsy. They are born of themselves. It seems to me that I only have to move my hands. These lights, these shadows, that 'chance' sends us, should be welcomed by us with astonishment and gratitude. The 'chance', for example, that guides our fingers when we tear paper, the forms that then take shape, give us access to mysteries, reveal to us the profound sources of life... Very often, the colour which one selects blindly becomes the vibrant heart of the picture... It is sufficient to close one's eyes for the inner rhythm to pass into the hands with more purity. This transfer, this flux is still easier to control, to guide in a dark room. A great artist of the Stone Age knew how to conduct the thousands of voices that sang in him; he drew with his eyes turned inward' (Jean Arp, Jours effeuillés. Poèmes, essais, souvenirs, 1920- 1965, Zurich, 1963, pp. 435-6).
In Rencontre - Begegnung (Meeting) of 1934 Arp's intuitively produced forms combine into an evocative portrait of an elemental nature operating as a constellation of abstract form. Using the guiding principles of chance and intuition as mystic channels that he believed operated through the unconscious and connected directly with the elemental heart of Nature, Arp arrived at a simple and bold constructive process. Rencontre - Begegnung is a powerful example of this process in action. Consisting solely of four wooden relief shapes against a dark green background, it articulates a sense of the flux and vitality of life. Enigmatic and indefinable, Arp's forms evoke the shape of clouds, cells, amoebas, growth, and change simultaneously. Placed together against the dark monochrome background in a carefully ordered but non-symmetrical, non-linear, non-rational composition, they combine to convey a sense of the illusive rhythm and ordering force of nature. Set against the strict geometry of the relief's square background, this rhythm is highlighted and brought to the fore as the real subject matter of the work. It is a perceptible and demonstrable ordering force that Arp described as the 'law of chance', a law 'which embraces all laws' but which is ultimately 'unfathomable like the first cause from which all life arises, (and) can only be experienced through complete devotion to the unconscious' (Hans Arp cited in exh. cat. Arp, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p. 33).
It was this devotion to the ultimate authority of the unconscious that brought Arp close to the Surrealists. A founder member of dada, Arp remained close to its freedom, irreverence, and anarchy all his life. 'I exhibited along with the Surrealists' he said, 'because their rebellious attitude toward 'art' and their direct attitude toward life were as wise as dada' (letter to Brzekowski, 1927, reproduced in M. Jean (ed.), Arp: Collected French Writings, London, 1966, p. 35).
In Rencontre - Begegnung (Meeting) of 1934 Arp's intuitively produced forms combine into an evocative portrait of an elemental nature operating as a constellation of abstract form. Using the guiding principles of chance and intuition as mystic channels that he believed operated through the unconscious and connected directly with the elemental heart of Nature, Arp arrived at a simple and bold constructive process. Rencontre - Begegnung is a powerful example of this process in action. Consisting solely of four wooden relief shapes against a dark green background, it articulates a sense of the flux and vitality of life. Enigmatic and indefinable, Arp's forms evoke the shape of clouds, cells, amoebas, growth, and change simultaneously. Placed together against the dark monochrome background in a carefully ordered but non-symmetrical, non-linear, non-rational composition, they combine to convey a sense of the illusive rhythm and ordering force of nature. Set against the strict geometry of the relief's square background, this rhythm is highlighted and brought to the fore as the real subject matter of the work. It is a perceptible and demonstrable ordering force that Arp described as the 'law of chance', a law 'which embraces all laws' but which is ultimately 'unfathomable like the first cause from which all life arises, (and) can only be experienced through complete devotion to the unconscious' (Hans Arp cited in exh. cat. Arp, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p. 33).
It was this devotion to the ultimate authority of the unconscious that brought Arp close to the Surrealists. A founder member of dada, Arp remained close to its freedom, irreverence, and anarchy all his life. 'I exhibited along with the Surrealists' he said, 'because their rebellious attitude toward 'art' and their direct attitude toward life were as wise as dada' (letter to Brzekowski, 1927, reproduced in M. Jean (ed.), Arp: Collected French Writings, London, 1966, p. 35).