HANS ARP (JEAN): quotes on Dada art by the famous artist creating moreover artworks: collages, poems and Dadaism writings; with sculptor quotations and biography facts
HANS JEAN ARP (1886 – 1966), artist quotes and quotations on Dada art and sculpture with biography facts: a French-German sculptor and famous for his abstract Dadaism and Surrealism art. Arp created moreover artworks like poems, paintings, Dadaist collages and writings, partly together with his wife Sophie Arp Tauber. He was a founding member of early Swiss and German Dada. Later in his artistic life he participated in French Surrealism. When Hans Arp spoke in German he referred to himself as ‘Hans’; in French he referred to himself as ‘Jean’. At the bottom useful art links and biography information on Hans Jean Arp (ed: Fons Heijnsbroek)
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Hans (Jean) Arp: ‘To be lost in the forest’, 1932 |
HANS / JEAN ARP, 31 artist quotes and talks on sculpture art, life and Dada with Schwitters
- Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man’s vanity to be loathsome.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dada art, artworks & sculpture: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, -this book gathers almost all Arp’s work in prose and some important poetry -, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 315 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- I wanted to find another order, another value for man in nature. He should no longer be the measure of all things, nor should everything be compared with him, but, on the contrary, all things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure. I wanted to create new appearances, to extract new forms from man. This is made clear in my objets from 1917.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 183 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism: creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- We do not wish to copy nature. We do not want to reproduce, we want to produce. We want to produce as a plant produces a fruit and does not itself reproduce. We want to produce directly and without meditation. As there is not the least trace of abstraction in this art, we will call it concrete art.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dada art, artworks & sculpture: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 183 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- These works (of more artists as Otto van Rees, shown in an exhibition in the Tanner Gallery in Zurich in 1915, fh) are constructed with lines, with surfaces, with shapes, with colors which try to attain, beyond the merely human, the infinite and the eternal. They negate our egoism… …The hands of our brothers, instead of serving us as if they were our own, have become the hands of the enemy. Celebrity and the masterpiece have replaced anonymity…
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dada art, artworks & sculpture: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 183 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- These painting, these sculptures – these objects – should remain anonymous, in the great workshop of nature, like the clouds, the mountains, the seas, the animals, and man himself. Yes! Man should go back to nature! Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages. In 1915, O. van Rees, A.C. van Rees (both were Dutch painters, fh), Freundlich, S. Taeuber (his future wife, fh) and I myself made an attempt of this sort.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 183 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone… … (but) it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses… … (art must be like) fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant or a child in it’s mother’s womb. (ca. 1930)
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dada art, artworks & sculpture: “Abstract Art”, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 113 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- I like nature but not its substitutes. Naturalist art, illusionism, is a substitute for nature. I remember that in arguing with Mondrian (in Paris 1920s, fh), he opposed art to nature saying that art is artificial and nature is natural. I do not share this opinion. I do not think that nature is in natural opposition to art. Art’s origins are natural.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 359 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- Actually, it was in Paris in 1914 that I did my first collages, for an occultist friend (for the Theosophic Institute in Paris, fh. They were mysterious porticos which were supposed to replace mural paintings and which evoked the structure of palm branches or fishbones (remark on his first collages in different materials, fh).
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dada art, artworks & sculpture: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 430 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- …These collages (he made in 1914, fh) were static symmetrical constructions, porticos with pathetic vegetation, the gateway to the realm of dreams. They were done with colored paper in black, orange or blue dye plates. Although cubist painting interested me very much, not a trace of their influence was to be found in my collages.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 420 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- We painted embroidered and made collages. All these works were drawn from the simplest forms and were probably the first examples of concrete art. These works are realities pure and independent with no meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected all mimesis and description, giving free reign to the elementary and spontaneous. (ca. 1916, remark on his cooperation with his future wife Sophie Täuber)
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dada art, artworks & sculpture: “Abstract Art”, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p.65 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- the streams buck like rams in a tent.
whips crack and from the hills come the crookedly combed
shadows of the shepherds.
black eggs and fools’ bells fall from the trees.
thunder drums and kettledrums beat upon the ears of the
donkeys.
wings brush against flowers.
fountains spring up in the eyes of the wild boar.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dada art, artworks & sculpture: line from Arp’s poem ‘Der Vogel Selbdritt’, Hans Arp; first published in 1920; “Gesammelte Gedichte I”, p. 41 (transl. Herbert Read); in “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs,”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 288 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While guns rumbled in the distance, we (Dada) sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men’s minds.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dada art, artworks & sculpture: “Dadaland”, 1938 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- In the good times of Dada, we detested polished works, the distracted air of spiritual struggle, the titans, and we rejected them with all out being.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 307 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- Dada was given the Venus of Milo a clyster and has allowed the Laocoön and his sons to rest awhile, after thousands of years of struggle with the good sausage Python. The philosophers are of less use to Dada than an old toothbrush, and it leaves them on the scrap heap for the great leaders of the world.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dada art, artworks & sculpture: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 63 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: “Abstract Art”, Anna Moszynska, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 66 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- It was Sophie ( Sophie Arp Tauber, woman artist and later Arp’s wife, fh) who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dadaism art, artworks & sculpture: ‘Unsern täglichen Traum’, Hans Arp; p. 76; as quoted in “Arp”, ed. Serge Fauchereau, Ediciones Poligrafa, S. A., Barcelona 1988, p. 11 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- Already in 1915, Sophie Tauber divides the surface of her aquarelles into squares and rectangles which she then juxtaposes horizontally and perpendicularly as Mondrian, Itten and Paul Klee did in the same period, fh). She constructs them as if they were masonry work. The colors are luminous, ranging from the raw yellow to deep red or blue.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 288 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- A deep and serene silence filled her (Sophie’s, fh) structures composed of colors and surfaces. The exclusive use of horizontal and vertical rectangular planes in the work of art, the extreme simplification, exerted a decisive influence on my work. Here I found, stripped down to the limit, the essential elements of all earthly constructions: the bursting, upward surge of the lines and the planes toward the sky, the verticality of pure life, and the vast equilibrium, the sheer horizontality and expansiveness of dreamlike peace. Her work was for me a symbol of a divinely built ‘house’ which man in his vanity has ravaged and sullied (Arp’s remark on the early art of Sophie Tauber, whom he married later, fh).
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dadaism art, artworks & sculpture: “Abstract Painting”, Michel Seuphor, Dell Publishing Co., 1964, p. 58 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dada / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- In 1915 Sophie Tauber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper (without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting, fh). These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: “The Art of Jean Arp”, Herbert Read, Abrams, New York 1968, p.p. 34, 38 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface… .Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dadaism art, artworks & sculpture: Hans Hofmann in “Search for the Real, Hans Hofmann”, Addison Gallery of modern Art, 1948 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dada / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, fh) because their attitude revolted against ‘art’ and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada’s. (1929)
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 406 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- In recent times (around 1930, fh), Surrealist painters have used descriptive illusionistic academic methods (critic on surrealists as Magritte and Dali, fh)
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dadaism art, artworks & sculpture: a letter to Jan Brzekowski, co-publisher of the Franco-Polish magazine: ‘L’art contemporain’; as quoted in “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 63 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dada / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- I use very little red. I use blue, yellow, a little green, but especially… …black, white and grey. There is a certain need in me for communication with human beings. Black and white is writing (1955).
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dadaism art, artworks & sculpture: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 288 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dada / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- Like the disposition of planes, the proportion of these planes and their colors seemed to depend only upon chance, and I declared that these works were ordered ‘according to the law of chance’, just like in the order of nature.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 307 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- Ever since my childhood, I was haunted by the search for perfection. An imperfectly cut paper literally made me ill, I would guillotine it. My collages came undone, they became blistered. I then introduced death and decay in my compositions. I reacted (around 1932, fh) by avoiding any precision from one day to another. Instead of cutting the paper, I would tear it with my hands.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dadaism art, artworks & sculpture: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 431 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dada / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- At daybreak I found on my sculptor’s turntable a little mischievous form (small plaster form of Impish Form, made in 1949, fh), alert and somewhat obese, with a stomach like a lute. It seemed to me like an imp. I called it that. And all od a sudden one day this little character, this imp, through a Venezuelan medium, found itself to be the father of a giant (he enlarged it, fh). This giant son resembles its father like an egg resembles another egg, a fig another fig, a bell another bell.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 431 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born, I have confidence in it (automatic painting, fh). I do not think about it. The forms arrive pleasant, or strange, hostile, inexplicable, mute, or drowsy. They are born from themselves. It seems to me as if all I do is move my hands.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and writings on Dadaism art, artworks & sculpture: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 307 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dada / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- Each one of these bodies ( works he made, fh) certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 383 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
- To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.
* Hans / Jean Arp, source of artist quotes and talk on Dada art & life: a late remark by Hans Arp made in Galerie Denise René in 1962, this quote is also the last line in the art book “Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs”, Gallimard, Paris 1966, p. 571 (famous German-French sculptor, painter and poet in Dadaism / Surrealism, creating sculpture, paintings, collages, poems; biography below)
Hans Jean Arp, not sourced quotes by the Dada artist on artworks and sculptures (creating abstract art, poetry, writings, collages and paintings)
- Art is a fruit that grows in man. (art life quotes, Hans / Jean Arp: Dada / Surrealism)
- The cynicism of Dadaists is a mask. (art life quotes, Hans / Jean Arp: Dada / Surrealism)
- Dada is for dreams, colourful paper masks, kettledrums, sound poems, concretions, poem statistics, for things that are not far from picking flowers and making bouquets. (art life quotes, Hans / Jean Arp: Dada / Surrealism)
- Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation, tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like grey vegetation. (art lifequotes, Hans / Jean Arp: Dada / Surrealism)
Hans Jean Arp, biography of the famous artist, sculptor and poet in Dada and Surrealism
Hans Arp /Jean Arp was a famous German-French artist of Dada; sculptor, painter, poet and a founding member of early Dada in Switzerland and Germany. He strived to achieve an art which was highly anonymous, general and impersonal, as appeared in his art-cooperation with Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (read Arp’s quotes) As a consequence of this art-option he made also a lot of art together with Sophie Arp-Taeuber, whom he married in 1922.
After his Dada involvement Hans / Jean Arp engaged himself with French Surrealism and lived and worked in Paris and in Zurich with his wife. Between 1927 and 1929 both stayed in Strasbourg where they cooperated with Theo van Doesburg in his architectural ‘Aubette’ project. It was Ellsworth Kelly, the American Hard Edge artist who visited the Arp’s a lot in Paris during the war; so the young American artist Kelly got encouraged in his new developing Hard Edge ideas by the European artists Hans Arp and Sophie Tauber!
Hans Jean Arp, art links for more biography facts about his life and creating sculpture art, poetry and collages in Dada
* many images and pictures of Hans (Jean) Arp’s sculpture art, on Google
* many images of Hans (Jean) Arp’s art, mainly his art on paper / canvas, on Google
* La fondation Arp with facts on Arp’s life and art, creating abstract sculpture
* life & art quotes by Dada artist Hans / Jean Arp, in Dutch language
