More by Jean Arp
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.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
I tried to be natural, in other words the exact opposite of what drawing teachers call 'faithful to nature'. I made my first experiments with free form.
I did exhibitions with the Surrealists [in Paris, c. 1929] because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
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.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
[art] urges man to identify himself with nature.
Abstract Art, Concrete Art (1942)
Each one of these bodies [art-works which Arp made] 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.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
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.
Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966)
It was Sophie 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 perfect equilibrium.
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