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Lot Essay
Cravates et tête is an early and important white monochrome relief made in 1927 shortly after the artist moved to Meudon on the outskirts of Paris and at the time of his closest involvement with the Surrealist movement.
Arp, who had first begun to make wood reliefs during the First World War at the time of his collaboration with the Dada group in Zurich, was never comfortably allied with any other movement other than perhaps Dada. His unique and highly personal art, one that gave rise to Alfred Barr describing him as "a one-man laboratory for the discovery of new form", was one that was rooted in an elemental view of nature and, despite his close participation with these groups, belonged neither to Surrealism nor to Neo-Plasticism. Founded on the innate principles he had laid down for himself while participating in Zurich Dada, the root of Arp's prodigious creativity lay in his own sense of the hidden poetry of life and in his embracing of chance, the irreverent, and most of all Nature.
Uniquely and fiercely independent, Arp's work of the 1920s reflected his search for forms that evoked the hidden mysteries of life and its innate poetry. Throughout the decade Arp's plastic work was closely allied to the irreverent imagery of his poetry and his writings. Bordering on abstraction Cravates et tête is a work that is heavily rooted in Arp's unique and whimsical sense of the poetic. Depicting a semi-abstract head floating in space and seemingly chased by a collation of bow-ties, on one level the work is a Surrealist fantasy on a par with some of Joan Miró's most bizarre imaginings. At the same time however, unlike Miró's work and in opposition to the Surrealist aims of creating a persuasively irrational image, Arp is primarily only interested in the formal properties such fanciful imagery can provoke. Painting the wooden construction completely white, Arp brings an analytical feel to his forms, isolating them against a monochrome background so that their formal properties are outlined and can be examined like cells under the microscope. In Arp's bizarre and impossible world the magical building blocks of nature, life and poetry seem to have been isolated. These building blocks he now makes dance by re-assembling them into what he would later describe as "constellations" of form. His guide in this process was always the intuitive voice of his unconscious and the key to his method of 'reassembly' was the "law of chance", a 'law' integral to Nature which he once described as the law "which embraces all laws and is unfathomable like the first cause from which all life arises, (and which also) can only be experienced through complete devotion to the unconscious." (cited in exh. cat. Arp, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p. 26).
Arp, who had first begun to make wood reliefs during the First World War at the time of his collaboration with the Dada group in Zurich, was never comfortably allied with any other movement other than perhaps Dada. His unique and highly personal art, one that gave rise to Alfred Barr describing him as "a one-man laboratory for the discovery of new form", was one that was rooted in an elemental view of nature and, despite his close participation with these groups, belonged neither to Surrealism nor to Neo-Plasticism. Founded on the innate principles he had laid down for himself while participating in Zurich Dada, the root of Arp's prodigious creativity lay in his own sense of the hidden poetry of life and in his embracing of chance, the irreverent, and most of all Nature.
Uniquely and fiercely independent, Arp's work of the 1920s reflected his search for forms that evoked the hidden mysteries of life and its innate poetry. Throughout the decade Arp's plastic work was closely allied to the irreverent imagery of his poetry and his writings. Bordering on abstraction Cravates et tête is a work that is heavily rooted in Arp's unique and whimsical sense of the poetic. Depicting a semi-abstract head floating in space and seemingly chased by a collation of bow-ties, on one level the work is a Surrealist fantasy on a par with some of Joan Miró's most bizarre imaginings. At the same time however, unlike Miró's work and in opposition to the Surrealist aims of creating a persuasively irrational image, Arp is primarily only interested in the formal properties such fanciful imagery can provoke. Painting the wooden construction completely white, Arp brings an analytical feel to his forms, isolating them against a monochrome background so that their formal properties are outlined and can be examined like cells under the microscope. In Arp's bizarre and impossible world the magical building blocks of nature, life and poetry seem to have been isolated. These building blocks he now makes dance by re-assembling them into what he would later describe as "constellations" of form. His guide in this process was always the intuitive voice of his unconscious and the key to his method of 'reassembly' was the "law of chance", a 'law' integral to Nature which he once described as the law "which embraces all laws and is unfathomable like the first cause from which all life arises, (and which also) can only be experienced through complete devotion to the unconscious." (cited in exh. cat. Arp, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p. 26).