Jean Arp

World House Galleries, New York
William Rand (acquired in 1960)
Private Collection, New York
Acquired from the above in 1998

Eduard Trier, Jean Arp Sculpture, His Last Ten Years, New York, 1968, no. 185a, illustration of another cast p. 108

Work is in excellent condition. A few minor nicks to the surface. Work has recently been cleaned and polished by Cameron Wilson Conservation Inc.
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Often guided by chance and intuition, Arp enjoyed creating organic, irregular shapes evocative of natural forms and parts of the human anatomy. Although he developed a highly abstract visual vocabulary, in his sculptures Arp always established a connection between these biomorphic forms and elements of the natural world in such a way as to unveil the mysterious and poetic elements hidden in everyday forms.

Although the highly polished form of the present work demonstrates the sleek modernist aesthetic that had been defined by Brancusi and Laurens, its amorphous and irregular shape evidences some of the central theme's of Arp's original manifesto. "All things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure," he wrote as a young artist, "I wanted to create new appearances, to extract new forms from man" (quoted in Serge Fauchereau, Arp, Barcelona, 1988, p. 15).

Fig. 1 The artist in his studio in Meudon, 1950