HANS ARP (1886-1966) Lot n° 36

S'élevant, 1962 Bronze, signed and numbered 2/6 H. 29.2 cm H. 11 1/2 in. Hans Arp S'élevant, 1962 Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp, also known as Jean Arp, was a painter and sculptor from Strasbourg who loved volumes and reliefs. As a student of Fine Arts in Weimar, the artist discovered a thirst for discovery and turned away from his teaching. From 1916, his name resounds in Zurich next to that of Tristan Tzara, among the founders of the Dada movement. "In his studio, word, form and color merged and were transformed into fabulous, unheard of, never seen worlds. Jean Arp plays on words and frees himself from the traditional forms of art. A surrealist from the beginning, Arp elaborated his "Arpadian encyclopedia", which was exempt from the laws of composition and tried the dogma of chance. At the origin of the abstraction-creation group, the artist produced sculptures from 1930, inspired by the spontaneity of nature, which he abandoned in the forest, with the aim of being discovered. As a true poet of organic forms, "S'élevant" is a continuation of Jean Arp's sculptures in the round. Artist with figurative allusions, Jean Arp remains according to André Breton one of the "inimitable models1". 1 Yvonne Duplessis, Le Surréalisme, PUF, 2002, "Historique" " He was making impossible couplings where the bacteria began to have a nose and the whole universe of new possibilities. We were finally the sons of the stars, the brothers of wheat, granite, water vapor. The Big Bang was not over".