讓·阿爾普

oil and gold paint on card laid down board
30.5 by 22.5cm.
Executed in 1927.

Paul Eluard, Paris (acquired from the artist)

Sir Roland Penrose, London (acquired from the above)

B.C. Holland, Chicago

Jean Chauvelin, Paris

Private Collection, Europe (acquired from the above in 1974 and sold: Sotheby’s, London, June 28, 2000, lot 195)

Acquired at the above sale by the present owner

Basel, Kunstmuseum, Schwitters Arp, 2004

Walter Kem, ‘Hans Arp’, in Das Neue Frankfurt, Frankfurt, no. 8, 1930, vol. IV, no. 36 (titled Tête-nez-moustache)

Bernd Rau, Hans Arp, Die Reliefs Œuvre-Katalog, Stuttgart, 1981, no. 110, illustrated p. 59

The Surrealist and the Photographer: Roland Penrose and Lee Miller (exhibition catalogue), Dean Gallery & The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 2001, listed p. 113

Executed on board laid down on card. The board has a few very minor cracks and creases on the lower edge and is unevenly proportioned. Apart from a few small spots of retouching on the nose and in the crimson pigment visible under ultra violet light, this work is in good condition.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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In 1925 Arp arrived in Paris and took a studio neighbouring those of Max Ernst and Joan Miró in the Villa des Fusains at 22 rue Tourlaque. Little over a year later he created Nez-moustache, nez-bouche which is an exceptional example of the painted reliefs he executed amidst the avant-garde artists of Montmartre. Michel Seuphor suggests that whilst "Arp had at this point associated himself with the Surrealist movement"it coincided with the moment when ‘his reliefs approached their most perfect" (M. Seuphor, op. cit., Stuttgart, 1981, p. xxiv). In Paris Arp submersed himself in work; creating highly inventive reliefs that possessed a potent biomorphic visual idiom which had evolved from his earlier, Dadaist, imagery. The voluptuous white form, central to the present work, is a particularly important motif that frequently occurred in his reliefs from the 1920s. Arp sometimes defined this silhouette as a pair of lips or a moustache. Nez-moustache, nez-bouche’s overlapping contours and pools of color transcend anatomical classification and embody Arp’s sensuous aesthetic.

Arp’s involvement with the Surrealist group had grown through his acquaintance with André Breton, the poet and de-facto leader of the Surrealists in Paris. Initially associated to the Zurich Dada group, working alongside Tristan Tzara and Sophie Täuber, Arp’s pioneering work became known to Breton, and along with other promising artists and writers he was induced to relocate to Paris. Commenting on Arp’s position between these two important groups Eric Robertson writes:  "Arp was without doubt the most creative, and the most introspective, of the Zurich group. According to Huelsenbeck [the Dada poet], “he only cared about the revolutionary implications of our artistic activities and hence of art in general”. Of these “revolutionary implications”, perhaps the most significant was the rejection of traditional painting styles and techniques. Arp shunned not only figurative illusionism, but even the medium of oil on canvas, evolving instead at an early stage what became constants of his mature work: semi-abstract biomorphic drawings and painted wooden reliefs in a heavily restricted palette, inhabited by a personal cosmogony of bottles, navel, torsos and heads" (E. Robertson, Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor, New Haven & London, 2006, pp. 70-71).