Jean Arp Quotes (1886-1966)

“Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.”

“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.”

“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'.”

“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 a gray vegetation.”

“Whatever became of '''Kurt Schwitters'''' novel Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling (Franz Müller's Wire Spring), several chapters of which we composed together? Is it buried under the bomb ruins of his house on Waldhausenstrasse in Hannover? For hours, Schwitters and I [Hans Arp] sat together and spun dialogue, in rhapsody. He took these writings and channeled them into his novel.. .We sat together again, writing Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling: Hans Arp: The nightingales have had enough of your hymnal Karagösen. Play violin on parrots, but avoid the women red hood ans snow widow. Kurt Schwitters: Should I pe-trify something for you? Or would you like play cry together? H. A.: Should we wash our tears or drown them? K. Schw.: You are a sipsnipper, Since when do your diamonds bark? H. A.: The water is getting hard. A fruit cries out loud and gives birth to a fish. K. Schw.: I'll p-ut it in the sea, or should I st-ab you with it?”

“Yes, I deal with accidents, just as Arp admits it all the time. And I admit it, too. But I like to have them under my command and not sign them because they are accidents.”

“As we liked to do as children, extracting from the soft forest floor the light chestnut trees only a few centimeters high at the base of which the chestnut continues to shine to the sun its clods of soil from the past, the chestnut conserving all of its presence and witnessing with its presence the power of green hands, of shadow, of airy white or pink pyramids of dances.. ..and of future chestnuts which, under new dust, would be discovered by the marveled sight of other children. It is in this perspective that the work of Arp, more than any other, should be situated. He found the most vital in himself in the secrets of this germinating life where the most minimal detail is of the greatest importance, where, on the other hand, the distinction between the elements becomes meaningless, adopting a peculiar under the rock humor permanently.”

“Arp, yes, was one of the artists that I was interested in. And that reminds me of a friend of those times, Frederick Kiesler, who was an architect and painter, a man of all trades, and who said this word about Arp: 'This is Arp, not art.' [Laughs]”

“Based on the metaphysical implications of the Dadaist dogma.. .Arp's Reliefs [carvings] between 1916 and 1922 are among the most convincing illustrations of that anti- rationalistic era...Arp showed the importance of a smile to combat the sophistic theories of the moment. His poems of the same period stripped the word of its rational connotation to attain the most unexpected meaning through alliteration or plain nonsense.”

“Tzara would draw [during Dada-evenings in Zürich, Switzerland] slips of paper with words described on them from a hat, and present the resulting combination of words as a poem. Arp allowed cut-outs of free or geometric shapes to arrange themselves in a random order, then pasted them on a surface and presented the result as a picture. In the course of such experiments Arp also used 'automatic writing', i.e.: irrational, spontaneously traced forms, rising from the unconsciousness.”

“We visited Meudon [c.1938] to see Hans Arp and though, to our disappointment, he was not there and his wife, Sophie Taeuber showed us his studio. It was very quiet in the room so that one was aware of the movement in the forms.. .I thought of the poetic idea in Arp's sculptures. I had never had any first-hand knowledge of the Dadaist movement, so that seeing his work for the first time freed me of many inhibitions and this helped me to see the figure in landscape with new eyes.. .Perhaps in freeing himself from material demands his idea transcended all possible limitations. I began to imagine the earth rising and becoming human.”

“Dada was founded in Zurich in the spring of 1916 by Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck at the Cabaret Voltaire [in Zurich, Switzerland].. .Arp was an Alsatian; he had lived through the beginning of the war and the whole nationalistic frenzy in Paris, and was pretty well disgusted with all the petty chicanery there, and in general with the sickening changes that had taken place in the city and the people on which we had all squandered our love before the war [World War 1., 1914-1918].”

“Mr. Arp hated shiny sculptures. He hated that. Because if it's shiny, you can't appreciate the form. It creates reflections.”

“I never stood under the influence of Dadaism because whereas the Dadaist created Spiegel-dadaismus (Mirror-Dada) on the Zurich Lake [the 'political Dada'], I created MERZ on the Leine-river, under the influence of Rembrandt. Time went on, and when Jean Arp made concrete Art, I stayed Abstract. Now I do concrete Art, and Marcel Duchamp went over to the Surrealists.. ..and at all I have much fun about Art.”