Larme de galaxie

Larme de galaxie is a striking example of Jean Arp’s mastery of three-dimensional abstraction. Conceived in 1962, at the peak of his maturity as an artist, it reflects the themes that he explored throughout his career: nature, space, and the origin of forms. Indeed, the smooth and richly-colored mass of bronze, with its grooves of deep dark-brown patina towering over an elegant light stone base designed by the artist, brings to mind the multitude of biomorphic shapes which he drew inspiration from and reinvented repeatedly in his oeuvre. Here, the voluptuous form crowned by two elongated peaks evokes the flowering buds which had fascinated him as early as the onset of his explorations as a sculptor in the 1930s, such as in Couronne de bourgeons (II) (1936), or later with Gueule de fleur (1960), just a few years before he conceived of the present work.
Describing this evolutionary mechanism in the artist’s work, which itself mimics the processes of nature, Eduard Trier wrote: “Each of Arp’s sculptures contains the seed of its growth from birth. What one of them has attained in completeness or greater perfection it passes on to the next. All these transmutations, transitions, pupations are not definitive. The forms remain fluid. They move on the road of one meaning to another... This is his syntax and it has imprinted itself on our minds by its modified repetition and underlying permanence. At an early stage Arp tapped a source that continually reaffirms its inexhaustibility” (op. cit., 1957, pp. xii and xiv).
The continuity of forms which sprung from the source Trier identifies is central to Larme de galaxie. While it might remind a viewer familiar with Arp of his representations of the vegetal world in its embryonic state, it could just as well be seen as the tip of a flame, a drop of rain, or dark matter falling through space. Finding the common thread between these images, the artist combined them with a poetic title which translates to Tear of the Galaxy.
Arp frequently gave his abstract works a lyrical, albeit open-ended, direction through their titles. He was a published writer and poet since his beginnings with the Dada collective, where he first learned to reject logic and reason in favor of intuition and surprise. Like his sculptures, his poems often dismissed traditional aesthetic rules in favor of abstract features and dreamlike imagery, reflecting his interest in the natural world and the workings of the unconscious mind. He employed wordplay, invented humorous new meanings, choosing inventiveness over correct syntax—opening the possibilities of language and pushing the boundaries of its fluidity, just as he would do in his sculptural practice.