A collector’s guide to Jean Arp

Jean Arp was born in Strasbourg in 1886, to a French mother and a German father — and tends to be known in German-speaking countries by the name of Hans Arp.

After studying at the Académie Julian in Paris, he moved to Munich in 1912, where he befriended Kandinsky and was briefly involved with the German Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (‘The Blue Rider’). At the outbreak of the First World War, he fled for the neutral city of Zurich, where his artistic career began in earnest.

Arp was a gifted poet and painter, though it’s as a sculptor that he’s best remembered — for his reliefs and, above all, his smoothly rounded, biomorphic forms. In November 2018, one of these, Déméter (1961), fetched $5,825,000 at Christie’s in New York, the highest price ever paid for an Arp at auction.

Barbara Hepworth, one of numerous sculptors he influenced, called him ‘extraordinary’ and said that ‘seeing Jean Arp’s work for the first time freed me of inhibitions’. He received a host of awards across his career, including the prestigious Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 1954 Venice Biennale, and in 1960 was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour.

‘Arp was one of the most innovative and inexhaustible artists of his time,’ says Valérie Didier, head of the Impressionist and Modern Art department at Christie’s in Paris. ‘He invented — and reinvented — his artistic vocabulary constantly.’

Dada and ‘automatic drawings’

In Zurich in 1916, Arp was one of the founder members of Dada, an anarchic movement protesting at the fact that so-called reason (on the part of world leaders) had precipitated a war in which millions died.

‘Dada aimed to destroy the rational deceptions of man and recover the natural and irrational order,’ Arp stated. His contributions included dragging his artworks through the street on a lead.

Shortly after arriving in Zurich, he met fellow artist Sophie Taeuber, who became a crucial collaborator of his for many years. They married in 1922.

With Sophie’s help, Arp produced a landmark set of collages known as papiers déchirés, in which he tore paper into pieces, dropped those pieces onto a larger sheet of paper, and pasted each scrap wherever it fell. A fine example, Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Law of Chance), is part of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection in New York.

True to Dada philosophy — which embraced all things random and irrational — the papiers déchirés left a huge chunk of the creative process to chance. This was something of a game-changer in the visual arts, which until then had always striven for a high level of skill and control.

In a similar vein, Arp produced a series known as his ‘automatic drawings’: works in which he deliberately let go of conscious intention and allowed his pen or pencil to roam where it wished. This freestyle approach would later influence Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists.

Arp’s ambiguous forms: towards abstraction

Jean and Sophie moved to Paris in the mid-1920s, eventually settling in a house that she designed in Clamart, a suburb in the city’s south-west. Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce were regular visitors.

Arp’s work in the 1920s was dominated by wooden bas-reliefs that he sawed into elaborate shapes and then painted. In La femme amphore, for example, the form of what looks like a woman can be seen emerging, as a relief, from what the title suggests is an amphora.

Arp’s shapes are deliberately playful and ambiguous, however, often veering towards abstraction — and one might easily see La femme amphore as depicting a foetus in a womb.

The biomorphic sculptures

In the 1930s, Arp began to create his most famous works: sensuous biomorphic sculptures in materials such as marble and bronze. These would remain the wellspring of his art for three decades.

Whereas the wooden bas-reliefs hung on walls, these were fully three-dimensional and placed on floors. What the sculptures share with the bas-reliefs, however, is that they come in allusive, near-abstract shapes. Most of them evoke nature in a certain way, resembling curious life-forms with some combination of human, animal and vegetal elements — the key point being that they’re wide open to interpretation.

Take the streamlined Entité ailée (‘Winged entity’), for example — might this be an avian or angelic being, or perhaps a seed pod borne on the wind?

Arp stated that, even with these works, he left a great deal to chance. ‘I don’t reflect,’ he wrote in 1963. ‘The forms come: pleasing or strange… They’re born of themselves… I only have to move my hands… The forms that then take shape offer access to mysteries and reveal to us the profound sources of life.’

Arp’s sculptures don’t depict a specific subject, because he himself never had one in mind; he gave titles to his works only after he’d completed them.

In the case of Déméter, it may be thought to depict the eponymous figure from Greek mythology, in her role as the mother of Persephone — the wide hips evoking abundant fertility, and a tilted head suggesting protective care.

Demeter was also the goddess of agriculture, however, and one might well see this sculpture instead as a germinating plant, with a new growth unfurling upward.

Tragedy and acclaim: late-career Arp

In 1943, Sophie died in a tragic accident, succumbing to carbon-monoxide poisoning. A grief-stricken Jean would stop making sculpture for a few years and seek solace in the study of ancient Tibetan and Christian mystic texts.

When he did return to sculpture, it was similar in style to his previous work, but, broadly speaking, even smoother and more lustrous. His final years were filled with prizes and recognition, including a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1958.

Arp died in 1966, aged 79. His influence extended far and wide: from Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Isamu Noguchi to the American minimalists of the 1960s and 1970s.

The market for Arp

For those new to collecting works by Jean Arp, his prints and multiples are an excellent place to start, says Didier. They come in the distinctive, exuberant shapes one would expect of Arp, yet at a relatively low price.

‘Demand is definitely growing,’ says Didier of the market for the artist's work in all media and genres. ‘His oeuvre has become better appreciated in recent years. Works offered at auction have helped to emphasise his ingenuity and versatility.’

Nine of the top 10 prices for Arp at auction have been realised in the past decade. According to Didier, two types of work are the most sought-after: his bas-reliefs from the 1920s, which are rare and bear witness to Arp’s seminal role in the development of Surrealism; and of course his biomorphic sculptures, executed in prestigious materials such as white marble or black granite — and characterised by their purity of line and immaculate polished surfaces.

‘The biomorphic works have a real timelessness and elegance to them,’ says the specialist. ‘That, I believe, is the key to their success. They appeal across the board, to collectors of classical, modern and contemporary art alike.’