At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Jean Arp was in Paris, where he was friendly with Picasso, Modigliani, Delaunay and the poets Apollinaire and Max Jacob. Alsatian by birth, Arp did not want to fight either Frenchmen or Germans, and in 1915 he fled to Zurich in neutral Switzerland. He created his first characteristic collages there, consisting of cut papers often laid down randomly.

Arp gravitated toward the circle of artists and writers who frequented Hugo Ball's Cabaret Voltaire from which the Zurich Dada movement emerged in mid-1916. During this time Arp extended the paper cut-out technique to sheets of plywood, from which he created his first wood reliefs, which in their compact complexity, appear to have issued forth fully-formed and mature.

The wooden reliefs from this period already show all the
originality and wit that were to distinguish Arp's work
throughout his career. He was to develop enormously his
technical capacities, his feeling for volume and for
variety. But the essential Arp is already revealed in these
works, and in the woodcuts and drawings of the period
(between 1915 and 1919 he illustrated eleven catalogues,
volumes of poems and other publications associated with Dada).
What distinguished Arp's work, over a period of half a
century, is its complete unity and consistency. He quickly
found his individual style and throughout the revolutionary
course pursued by the modern movement, to which he gave his
full support, he never found it necessary to change it. He
had from the beginning established a principle of development,
expressed in the often-quoted words from his 'dada diary',
'Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant,
like a child in its mother's womb.' To this organic principle
he was to be faithful all his life. (H. Read, Arp, London,
ÿ 1968, p. 42)