Jean Arp

Biography
1887 - 1966

About the artist

Jean Arp (1887, Strassburg, Germany/now: Strasbourg, France – 1966, Basel, Switzerland), also called Hans Arp, full name Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp, or Jean-Pierre Guillaume Arp) was a French sculptor, painter and poet.

He was one of the avant-gardists in the first half of the 20th century. He was educated as an artist in Strasbourg, in Weimar (Germany), and in Paris at the Académie Julian.
After a period in Switzerland (1909-912) he left for Munich, where he met Wassily Kandinsky and the Expressionist artists of the Blaue Reiter. Afterwards he got acquainted with the members of Der Sturm in Berlin and in 1913 he exhibited wih them. In 1914 he returned to Paris, where he became friends with Amadeo Modigliani, Pablo Picasso, and Sonia and Robert Delaunay. During World War I, Arp took refuge in Zürich, where he became one of the founders of the Dada movement in early 1916. Soon after arriving in Zürich, he met the artist Sophie Taeuber and married her in 1922. The couple created nonrepresentational ‘Duo-Collages.’ During that period Arp also began creating painted wooden reliefs-layers of shapes inspired by nature.
After the war they settled in Germany and from 1926 at Meudon, near Paris. During the 1920s Arp was associated with the Surrealists. In 1931 he participated in the Abstraction-Création group, which lead him to Constructivism. During World War II Arp stayed at Zürich, where his wife died in 1943. After the war Arp returned to Meudon and continued his experiments with abstract form and colour in paintings and sculptures. He also wrote essays and poetry. Arp’s Collected French Writings (1974) were edited by the Surrealist artist and writer Marcel Jean.

Arp enjoyed many successes, including Grand Prize for Sculpture at the 1954 Venice Biennale.

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