Jean Arp 1966 Everett Ellin Gallery Los Angeles, California Exhibition Brochure
March 25 - April 13, 1966
3.25” x 8.5” Folded
23” x 8.5” Open
Everett Ellin Gallery
#### Sunset Blvd.
Los Angeles 69, California
Exhibition Catalog
ARP MARCH 25-APRIL 13
EVERETT ELLIN GALLERY
The collective works of Jean Hans Arp, the fruits of a remarkably fertile imagination, stand as one of the most significant creative achievements of our time. Perhaps more than any other living artist, his ideas have influenced the entire course of plastic experience, not only in painting and sculpture but in the art of design (including architecture) as well. O Born in 1887, he emerged as a figure of importance in 1915, in the role of a founding member of the Dada movement in Zurich. Shortly thereafter his first wood reliefs were to appear, which remained his chief form of sculptural activity until the early thirties when he began to work in the round, both in bronze and stone.
He has since continued to do both sculptures and reliefs (selections from which constitute this exhibition), allowing himself the full interplay implicit in these two related but yet divergent means of expression. © Arp spanned the mainstreams of art of the first half of this century, having exerted a powerful effect upon the Dada, Surrealist and Neo-plastic movements. In the fullness of his time, he has evolved a remarkable synthesis between appar ently opposed attitudes: between the organic and the geometric, between chance and rationality, between the particular and the universal, between the natural and the consciously structural. It is not surprising, therefore, that artists from every contemporary direction continue to draw inspiration from his work. His later efforts are characterized by an increasing preoccupation with biomorphic forms and a constant search for universal values through the distillation of images of almost subliminal subtlety.
Although deeply concerned with the world of nature and with commonplace objects, he seeks to give new meaning to the familiar, which he employs as a means of access to subconscious levels where man's primeval spirit or racial memory is stirred. © These quiescent images are, therefore, meta physical statements of the unchanging truths of our natural world, expressed in forms as elemental and timeless as the life force itself.
EVERETT ELLIN
Jean ARP
Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp (16 September 1886 – 7 June 1966), better known as Jean Arp in English, was a German-French sculptor, painter, and poet. He was known as a Dadaist and an abstract artist.
Jean Arp
Born
Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp
16 September 1886
Straßburg, Alsace-Lorraine, German Empire
Died 7 June 1966 (aged 79)
Basel, Canton of Basel-Stadt, Switzerland
Nationality
German
Education
Académie Julian
Known for
Sculpture, painting
Movement
Abstraction-Création, Surrealism, Dada
Spouse(s)
Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach
In 1904, after leaving the École des Arts et Métiers in Straßburg, he went to Paris where he published his poetry for the first time. From 1905 to 1907, he studied at Kunstschule in Weimar, Germany, and in 1908 went back to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian. Arp was a founder-member of the first modern art alliance in Switzerland Moderne Bund in Lucerne in 1911, participating in their exhibitions from 1911 to 1913.
In 1912 he went to Munich and called on Wassily Kandinsky, the influential Russian painter and art theorist. Arp was encouraged by him in his researches and exhibited with the Der Blaue Reiter group. Later that year, he took part in a major exhibition in Zürich, along with Henri Matisse, Robert Delaunay, and Kandinsky. In Berlin in 1913, he was taken up by Herwarth Walden, the dealer and magazine editor who was at that time one of the most powerful figures in the European avant-garde.
In 1915 he moved to Switzerland to take advantage of Swiss neutrality. Arp later told the story of how, when he was notified to report to the German consulate in Zurich, he pretended to be mentally ill in order to avoid being drafted into the German Army: after crossing himself whenever he saw a portrait of Paul von Hindenburg, Arp was given paperwork on which he was told to write his date of birth on the first blank line. Accordingly, he wrote "16/9/87"; he then wrote "16/9/87" on every other line as well, then drew one final line beneath them and, "without worrying too much about accuracy", calculated their sum. Hans Richter, describing this story, noted that "they [the German authorities] believed him."
It was at an exhibition that year where he first met the artist Sophie Taeuber who was to become his collaborator in the production of works of art and a significant influence on his artistic style and working method. They married on 20 October 1922.
In 1916 Hugo Ball opened the Cabaret Voltaire, which was to become the centre of Dada activities in Zurich for a group that included Arp, Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, and others. In 1920, as Hans Arp, along with Max Ernst and the social activist Alfred Grünwald, he set up the Cologne Dada group. In 1925 his work also appeared in the first exhibition of the Surrealist group at the Galérie Pierre in Paris.
The Henri Bergson Influence
In 1926 Arp moved to the Paris suburb of Meudon. In 1931 he broke with the Surrealist movement to found Abstraction-Création, working with the Paris-based group Abstraction-Création and the periodical, Transition. Beginning in the 1930s the artist expanded his efforts from collage and bas-relief to include bronze and stone sculptures. He produced several small works made of multiple elements that the viewer could pick up, separate, and rearrange into new configurations.
Throughout the 1930s and until the end of his life, he wrote and published essays and poetry. In 1942 he fled from his home in Meudon to escape German occupation and lived in Zürich until the war ended.
Material Success
Arp visited New York City in 1949 for a solo exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery, and this coincided with a general international recognition of his work. In 1950 he was invited to execute a relief for the Harvard University Graduate Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts and would also be commissioned to do a mural at the UNESCO building in Paris. Arthur and Madeleine Lewja, of Galerie Chalette, who had known Arp in Europe, became his gallery representatives in New York in the late 1950s, and were instrumental in establishing his reputation on the American side of the Atlantic.
In 1958, a retrospective of Arp's work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, followed by an exhibition at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France, in 1962. In 1972, the Metropolitan Museum of Art showcased Jean Arp's work from the Lejwa's collection and a few works lent by Arp's widow, Marguerite Arp. The exhibition was expanded and traveled as "Arp 1877–1966," first exhibited at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and then shown in seven museums in the United States and six in Australia. Organized by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts and the Wurttembergischer Kunstverein of Stuttgart, a 150-piece exhibition titled "The Universe of Jean Arp" concluded an international six-city tour at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1986.