THE DEVELOPMENT OF EUREOPEAN PAINTING AVANT/GARDE – Jean Arp, an career influenced by various groups of artists

JEAN ARP 1/3 – He was born a German citizen, and died French. When he spoke in German, he referred to himself as “Hans”, and when he spoke in French he referred to himself as “Jean”. He was born in Strasbourg (the son of a French mother and a German father), during the period following the Franco-Prussian War. He was a sculptor, painter, poet, and abstract artist, and his career was distinguished with many awards. In 1904 he went to Paris, where he published his poetry for the first time.

JEAN ARP 2/3 – Throughout the 1930s and until the end of his life, he wrote and published essays and poetry. From 1905 to 1907, he studied at the Kunstschule in Weimar, Germany, and in 1908 went back to Paris. He traveled to Munich in 1912, where he met Kandinsky, and through him became briefly associated with the Expressionist artists’ group. He returned to Paris in 1914, and befriended Modigliani, Picasso, and Sonia and Robert Delaunay, as well as the writer Max Jacob.

JEAN ARP 3/3 – In 1915, he moved to Switzerland (to take advantage of Swiss neutrality), where he was a founding member of the Dada movement. In 1925, his work appeared in the first exhibition of the surrealist group, at the Galérie Pierre in Paris, but in 1931 he broke with the Surrealist movement, to found Abstraction-Création. He (and his first wife, the artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp), in the 1930s, they bought a piece of land in Clamart and built a house at the edge of a forest.

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