Hans (Jean) Arp Biography
Strasbourg, France 1887 - Basil, Switzerland 1966
Sculptor, painter and poet, today recognized as one of the pillars of Contemporary Art.
He studied painting in his home city of Weimar and at the Julian Academy in Paris.
In 1912 he visited Kandinsky in Munich and met Klee. A little after he associated himself with the known group Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), participating in the exhibition that would carry out that same year.
In 1914, again in Paris, he struck up friendships with artists like Picasso, Jacob, Modigliani y Delaunay. As the First World War began to blow up he moved to Zurich, where he participated in the foundation of the Dada movement. In this period he completed collages and his first wooden reliefs. At the end of the war he resided in Cologne for some years.
In 1921 he married Sophie Taeuber, a Swiss artist whom he had known in Zurich, moving, the next year, to Paris. There began the Surrealist movement, Arp participating in various exhibitions that he would carry out. In 1926 he established his studio in Meudon, close to Paris, uniting himself, in 1931, to the Abstract-Creation group. During this decade he began to dedicate himself to sculpture, a discipline in which he would accomplish his most important artistic contribution.
In 1939, at the beginning of the Second World War, he returned to Switzerland, where his wife would pass away in 1943. At the end of the war he returned to his studio in Meudon, where he continued developing his sculpture work.
His work is housed in the Tate Gallery in London, in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in the Museum of Art in the city of Philadelphia and in the Museum of Art in Basil, a Swiss location where he would later pass away in 1966. The last retrospective sign that he dedicated himself to in life was his completion of a work in 1962 in the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.
Articles: - Hans Arp: el artista que cazaba nubes
El Pais, 1 Noviembre, 2001 - Hans Arp
By Paola L. Fraticola