I n the garden of what was once Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Jean Arp’s house and workshop in Clamart, France, near Paris, stands an oblate sphere in bronze, maybe a meter high, that coils in and around itself in a graceful interplay of solid form and emptiness. It is both heavy and light, and there’s an undercurrent of movement like the motion of celestial bodies. Arp called this piece “Ptolémée,” for the Greek astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, who modeled the universe in the second century. Arp made three sculptures in this series, the one in the garden being “Ptolémée II.”
“Ptolemy was the first to identify the currents of constellations—how the movements of stars are woven together. That’s the idea that stuck in Arp’s head,” said Sébastien Tardy, the curator of the Fondation Arp’s collection, now housed in the artist’s former workshop.
Once he saw Arp’s sculpture, it stuck in designer Hedi Slimane’s head, too. Since he was named creative director of Celine in 2018, Slimane has aligned the fashion brand with the world of fine art. Soon after joining, he launched the Celine Art Project, which now displays some 200 artworks—some commissioned, some bought—in Celine boutiques around the world. Slimane followed up with a program called Bijoux d’Artistes, which reproduces masterpieces of sculpture in miniature as limited-edition jewelry. The first two bijoux were works by César and Louise Nevelson. Now, a small hanging pendant of Arp’s “Ptolémée II” makes three.
It is a fascinating choice. Arp is well known and yet not so well known, just as he was in his lifetime. Arp conceived “Ptolémée II” in 1958, in a late blast of creativity, eight years before his death in 1966. He only started sculpting when he was in his 40s, but from the very beginning he had consecrated his life wholly and utterly to art—poetry first and always, and then anything else that came to hand. His friends and colleagues were the great names of 20th-century art’s early flowering; his influence permeated the wild movements that shaped modernism—dadaism, which he helped found, then surrealism.
But while others sought fame’s spotlight, Arp worked mostly in the shadows, where he was perfectly content. He was never a brash self-promoter like his friends Salvador Dalí and André Breton. His avatars, he said, were the unsung artists of the Middle Ages who toiled in communal anonymity for the greater glory of their creations. It was an unusual attitude for Arp’s riotous times, and it feels positively wacky in ours.
What Arp enjoyed that few of his peers had was the happy congruence of a true aesthetic and conjugal partnership. It is impossible to talk about Jean Arp without talking about Sophie Taeuber, even though fate took her from Arp’s side midway through their journey. Arp met Taeuber in 1915 in Zurich, where he had fled to avoid the German draft—he was born Hans Arp in 1886 in Strasbourg, when the city was still part of Germany.
Zurich’s raucous Cabaret Voltaire was the delivery-room for Dada, and Arp was among its midwives, writing poems and making collages and illustrations for various Dada magazines. Taeuber was making avant-garde textiles and woodcuts, not to mention dancing—artistically, mind you—at the cabaret. It was a time when everybody did pretty much everything, and no one questioned your right to do it. (Arp had spent some time in art schools but found them stiff and uninspiring and dropped his formal training.)
Before long, Arp and Taeuber were an inseparable pair, joined at the hip in art and life. According to Arp, in their joint works, including embroideries, weavings, paintings and collages, “we humbly tried to approach the pure radiance of reality. I would like to call these works the art of silence. It rejects the exterior world and turns toward stillness, inner being and reality. With rectangles and squares we built radiant monuments to deepest sorrow and loftiest joy. We wanted our work to simplify and transmute the world and make it beautiful.” Nothing less.
It wasn’t that they always worked together on the same pieces. Each was busy with his or her own projects, in whatever form they took. But whoever’s hands executed a task, that task was animated by their twin spirits. “Even if Arp and Taeuber had distinct styles, you can always see the imprint of one on the other’s work,” Tardy says. “It’s a perpetual piece for four-hand piano.”
They married in 1922, after which she was known as Sophie Taeuber-Arp. Neither of them made much money, although Taeuber-Arp was the more employable of the two of them, thanks to her training in applied skills such as weaving, graphics and architecture. This last skill won Taeuber-Arp a commission to reimagine L’Aubette, a center for cultural and leisure activities in an old Strasbourg municipal building. Of course, she brought her husband in on the job, along with a Dutch architect named Theo van Doesburg.
The Arps didn’t make a fortune from the Aubette job, but it still managed to pay for a plot of land in Clamart, a suburb west of Paris, and the small maison-atelier that Taeuber-Arp designed for it. By 1929, they had completed the building, a kind of tabernacle for their mystic-artistic communion. It is a handsome house, built from the traditional pockmarked stone called meulière but transformed here into a tidy Bauhausian box that sets it apart in its bourgeois French neighborhood.
“[Arp] had a poet’s spirit, always letting inspiration guide him. You can see it in his sculptural process. He never took an established path, following a sketch.”
Arp was transformed here as well. In the couple’s rectangular bubble, where all boundaries between art and life dissolved, he started working in plaster, exploring the sinewy, biomorphic shapes that stand as his artistic legacy. In sculpture, as in all his other endeavors, he avoided following a pre-conceived blueprint. He preferred to let his work shape itself as it emerged under his hands, to the point where he sometimes worked with his eyes closed to let happenstance guide him. A line in bronze or stone will appear and then, quite suddenly, disappear, as if it had decided on its own to just stop. Arp does this all this time.
“He had a poet’s spirit, always letting inspiration guide him,” Tardy says. “You can see it in his sculptural process. He never took an established path, following a sketch. Sophie was different—very determined. They had very different ways of working.”
It is well worth visiting the Arp-Taeuber house if you’re in Paris, which is something the Fondation Arp would very much like you to do. It is a small place on several tight levels. The walls are covered with her drawings and sketches, his paper cutouts, some with a dot in a circle to represent a human belly button—one of Arp’s cherished symbols, representing rebirth and creation. His small plaster models and her re-worked furniture are scattered around. It all testifies to the immersive daily life of two full-time artists. What were they like as a couple? We don’t really know. They were so constantly in one another’s company that we have virtually no correspondence between them.
“A workshop-house is something you don’t often see,” Tardy said. Rodin’s country house up the road at Meudon, with its comfortable mansion and separate studio for him and his many assistants, is another thing altogether. “For the Arps, daily life is art. It’s all mixed up.”
They still didn’t make much money. Few galleries showed Arp’s work, and while he was friends with the whole artsy “clique Parisienne,” he never shared their notoriety or their sales. And then World War II broke out, and the Arps decamped, first to the south of France and then, as war came closer, to Switzerland, where the artist Max Bill gave them aid and shelter. Taeuber-Arp died there in 1943, suffocated by the gas from a leaky stove. Arp was shattered and stopped working altogether for two or three years.
The Arp that puts himself back together after the war is the Arp that people who know something about him think of. He marries again, and his new wife is young and rich, and, moreover, committed to promoting him. He wins prizes. He journeys to New York, where he is astonished to find he’s better appreciated than he was in Europe. There is irony here. In the art market between the wars, New York played second fiddle to Paris. Arp’s Paris galleries often resorted to sending his work out of town when it didn’t sell back home. What goes around comes around. This foreign exposure, born of desperation, went a long way toward establishing Arp’s international reputation.
“With rectangles and squares we built radiant monuments to deepest sorrow and loftiest joy. We wanted our work to simplify and transmute the world and make it beautiful.’”
The Arp of the 1950s is also the Arp that caught Slimane’s attention when he went looking for another artist for the Bijoux d’Artistes series. This worked out well all around. Former Canal+ artistic director Etienne Robial, who joined the Fondation Arp as president four years ago, has made it his mission to bring Arp’s and Taeuber-Arp’s work to a wider public. For instance, you will soon be able to purchase candlesticks and needlework patterns designed by Sophie Taeuber-Arp.
Celine’s “Ptolémée II” pendant raises the stakes considerably. Arp is known for the way he employed empty space as an element in his sculptures, which has led some to compare him to the English sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. But reproducing Arp’s intricate dialogue between solid and void in miniature proved fiendishly difficult. Celine consigned the work to the same Parisian jewelry house that reproduced its César and Nevelson pendants. The back and forth between Celine and the Fondation throughout the development process was painstaking and extensive. There will be only 100 “Ptolémée II” pendants produced—50 in vermeil, 50 in silver—and it has taken two years to make them.
The higher hurdle, however, is a moral one. “We were preoccupied with the question, Would Arp have validated this thing?” says Robial. The Foundation already rejected a request from Swatch to use Taeuber-Arp’s cutouts on watch bands. “We said no, which is annoying because it would have brought us some money,” Robial says. Celine’s “Ptolémée II” pendant passed the smell test easily, to the point that it bears the signatures of both Arp and Celine. According to Robial: “Based on everything we know and have read, we’re convinced Arp would have said, ‘That’s very good.’”
For some artists, jewelry-making has served as an extension of their sculptural or surrealist practice. For others, translating their art into jewelry allows them to explore new materials and reach new collectors.
