🔥 Fine Vintage 1960 Modern Biomorphic Abstract DADA Bronze Sculpture, Jean ARP?

Description: This is a visually striking and Fine Vintage 1960s Modern Biomorphic Abstract DADA Bronze Sculpture, reminiscent of and possibly attributed to the sculptural work of the European Modernist sculptor, Jean Arp (1886 - 1966.) This artwork depicts a multi-faceted biomorphic form, with an overall smooth organic rendering, contrasted with several sharp angles and an opening, which is also reminiscent of English sculptor, Henry Moore's Large Interior Form (1953 - 1954.) This piece is cast in solid bronze and is approximately 18 3/4 inches tall (including base.) Actual visible sculpture is approximately 17 1/2 inches. Good overall condition for decades of age and storage, with a few faint scratches to the surface, light speckles of verdigris, and one faint horizontal casting mark, which resembles a fissure, across only one fact of the lower half of the sculpture. This artwork appears to be unsigned, but perhaps you recognize the artist or their work? Please send me a message if you do. This piece could easily be ascribed as a companion to Jean Arp's 1960 sculpture, titled: Torse Vegetal. This sculpture is very well made and looks important. Acquired from an old and affluent estate collection in Los Angeles County, California. If you like what you see, I encourage you to make an Offer. Please check out my other listings for more wonderful and unique artworks! About Jean (Hans) Arp: Jean (Hans) Arp Born: 1886/87 - Strasbourg, Alsace Lorraine, FranceDied: 1966 - Basel, SwitzerlandKnown for: Abstract sculpture, installation, paintingName variants: Hans Arp Jean (Hans) Arp (1886/87 - 1966) was active/lived in France, Switzerland. Jean Hans Arp is known for Abstract sculpture, installation, painting. Biography from the Archives of askART Jean Arp was a painter, a poet and sculptor. He was born on September 16, 1886, in Strasbourg, which is in the area known as Alsace-Lorraine, near the boundary of Germany and France. His art retained a feeling for life on the border. He balanced a Gallic playfulness with a romantic mysticism that is essentially German. (He wrote in both languages). He longed to escape from the conventional borders of modern life, into a community of the spirit. He considered realistic art absurdly limited and egotistical. In 1904 he studied at the School of Decorative Arts, Strasbourg; he took further training in Weimar. In 1908 he traveled to Paris to enroll in the Academie Julian. Arp produced paintings that were almost abstract in design. In 1912 he visited Kandinsky and briefly joined the Blaue Reiter; he showed at the first Autumn Exhibition.He returned to Paris in 1914 and became friendly with Picasso, Modigliani and Robert Delaunay. He founded the Dada Movement in Switzerland after World War I, then brought the Dadaist ideas to Cologne. He married Sophie Taeuber in 1921. She was an important Swiss artist. More than just an influence, she was an inspiration to Arp. Her "clear work and clear life," he once wrote, "showed me the right way, the way to beauty."Arp took part in the Surrealist circle for a short period. He settled in Meudon, outside Paris. His few paintings all date before 1914. In his Dada and Surrealist periods, he concentrated on collages, in drawings and reliefs, in painting on perforated wood or designs with wool. He was drawn more to sculpture during his mature years; also engraving, tapestry and poetry.Jean Arp is one of the gentle revolutionaries of modern art. Important to the dada and surrealist movements and a significant poet as well as artist, he helped shape the modernist faith. He attacked the barbarism of the 20th century, mocked the vanity of reason and sought an art of spirital regeneration. A pioneer of abstract art, he developed one of its principal visual vocabularies: biomorphic shapes that invoke nature. Yet Arp remained free of the angry swagger, the desire to pack the big punch, that characterized many of his contemporaries. His art is light as air, and his contempt is softened by humor. He was a twinkling sort of man. Today nothing is rarer than the light touch.As a dadaist in Zurich in 1916-1918, he joined Taeuber is making geometric abstract art. They aspired to the impersonality of divine order and avoided making marks that looked too individual. Arp never made a tight picture. He allowed a happy relaxation, a formal gaiety into the composition.Rigorous geometry was more to Taeuber's taste than his, and Arp soon found another way to render his utopian fancies. He created an imagery that evoked rocks, leaves, twigs, birds. He did not actually depict such things but suggested the play of nature as it germinates, ripens, decays. He became increasingly interested in an oval shape, which he would refer to as a naval, a symbol of life itself.Arp treasured chance - collisions of coincidence, slips of tongue and pen and brush, meetings between strangers. At such moments the world woke up and the ordinary became remarkable. As he grew older, Arp make simple "constellations" of forms, which suggest the play of both cells and heavenly bodies. Upon discovering that some of his early works were damaged in storage, he tore them up and remade them into collages - a symbol of decay and regeneration. The sensuous curves of his sculpture, reminiscent of breast and buttocks, invite the caress of a palm.Nightmares rarely intrude on Arp's dreamy work. Still, the later art is heavier in spirit. The accidental death of Taeuber in 1943 depressed him profoundly. He made a kind of fetish of her memory. His art, especially the sculpture, became more conventional, less magical. In the earlier work, what's really impressive is exactly what exasperated some people about Arp's creations: the childish throwaway quality. The art is almost not art. It lacks finish - finishing would be a kind of death. It's so loose. No early work looks like it costs money. It's as light, as quick, as free as inspiration itself. A squiggle is a bow tie, a mustache, a smile, a bird.During World War II, he lived in retirement at Grasse. At the conclusion of the war he returned to Meudon, near Paris. He involved himself doing sculpture, writing poetry, etc. In 1949-50 be visited the United States and completed a monumental wood and metal relief for Harvard University, and a mural relief for the UNESCO Building in Paris in 1958. He won the international prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1954, He died in 1966.Arp has been called "one of the strangest personalities of this century". There were few groups to which he was not made welcome and few movements to which he was not attached. Yet a certain naive and childlike quality remained distinctive in his art. He founded no school and had no disciples, yet cumulatively his influence on the development of contemporary art has been great.Written and compiled by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher of Laguna Woods, California.Sources:The Oxford Companion to 20th Century Art, edited by Harold Osborn Mark Stevens in Newsweek, August 24, 1987 Biography from Taylor - GrahamThough he often worked in both marble and bronze, Jean Arp infused all his efforts with a lightness not to be mistaken for mere humor. His was a buoyant, amused, and somewhat wry approach to making, which resulted from an essentially comic view of life; it is this lightness, I suspect, that allows us to appreciate Arp's work beyond the local contexts of Dada, Surrealism, and Abstraction-Creation. Arp had seen and experienced much, yet it seems not particularly important to analyze the influences upon him of his varied background. It is clear that his mercurial mind, his need for human contacts, and his extrovert character hardly interfered with his poetic attitude.Dada gave Arp his freedom. In Paris, Brancusi, even more than Cubism, showed him that sculpture could free itself from archaism and arrive at pure geometrical forms which do not conflict with nature but are parallel to it. The process was closely in affinity to the surrealist mentality, but instead he developed a remarkably personal style all his own. The titles of his works, to which he gave a great deal of attention, and some of which he changed later, suggest that his literary work cannot be separated from his sculpture. This is important because it is a clue to the miracle of Arp's creations. Arp actually performed the poetic feat of transforming shape into organism.German-French sculptor, painter and poet. Jean Arp (also called Hans Arp) was born in Alsace and studied at the Strasbourg School of Arts and Crafts, at Weimar (1905-7) and the Academie Julian, Paris (1908). In 1912 he went to Munich where he knew Kandinsky and exhibited semi-figurative drawings at the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1912, and 1913 he exhibited with the Expressionists at the first Hebrstsalon (Autumn Salon) in Berlin.Aware of the developments within the French avant-garde through his contacts with such figures as Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Robert Delaunay in 1914, Arp exhibited his first abstracts and paper cutouts in Zurich in 1915 and began making shallow wooden reliefs and compositions of string nailed to canvas. In 1916, he was a founder member of Dada in Zurich, he participated in the Berlin Dada exhibition of 1920, and in 1923 he visited Schwitters in Hanover. In Paris, Arp began to evolve his personal style of abstract compositions through an organic morphology, frequently sensuous in form, and began to experiment with automatic composition (automatism). In 1925, he participated in the first Surrealist exhibition in Paris, before breaking with Surrealism to become a founder member of Abstraction-Creation in 1931, when his characteristic organic forms became more severe and geometrical. At a time when he began to turn towards full 3-D sculptures, Arp insisted that his sculpture was 'concrete' rather than 'abstract', since it occupied space, and that art was a natural generation of form: 'a fruit that grows in man', as he put it.Arp visited the USA in 1949 and 1950, and completed a monumental wood and metal relief for Harvard University, and a mural relief for the UNESCO Building in Paris in 1958. He won the international prize for sculpture at the Venice Biennale in 1954.A dominant personality within Dada, Surrealism and abstract art, his reliefs and sculptures have had a decisive influence upon the sculpture of this century.Collections:Guggenheim Museum, New York CityMuseum of Modern Art, New York CityNational Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.National Gallery of Australia, CanberraNational Gallery of Canada, OttawaSan Francisco Museum of Modern ArtCincinnati Art Museum, Ohio - Provenance ResearchCleveland Museum of Art, OhioGAM - Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, TurinHirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.Kunstmuseum Basel, SwitzerlandLos Angeles County Museum of Art DatabaseMiddelheim Open-Air Museum for Sculpture, Antwerp, BelgiumMUMOK - Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, ViennaMuseum of Modern Art, New York CityNorton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CaliforniaPomona College Museum of Art, CaliforniaReina Sofía National Museum, MadridRoyal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium CatalogueSmith College Museum of Art, MassachusettsTate Gallery, LondonUniversity of Arizona Museum of ArtUniversity of Lethbridge Art GalleryBiography from Anderson Galleries Jean Arp (also called Hans Arp), a sculptor, painter, and poet was born in Alsace and studied at the Strasbourg School of Arts and Crafts, at Weimar (1905-7) and the Academie Julian, Paris (1908).In 1912 he went to Munich where he knew Kandinsky and exhibited semi-figurative drawings at the second Blaue Reiter exhibition in 1912, and 1913 he exhibited with the Expressionists at the first Hebrstsalon (Autumn Salon) in Berlin. Aware of the developments within the French avant-garde through his contacts with such figures as Apollinaire, Max Jacob and Robert Delaunay in 1914, Arp exhibited his first abstracts and paper cutouts in Zurich in 1915 and began making shallow wooden reliefs and compositions of string nailed to canvas.In 1916 he was a founder member of Dada in Zurich, he participated in the Berlin Dada exhibition of 1920, and in 1923 he visited Schwitters in Hanover. In Paris, Arp began to evolve his personal style of abstract compositions through an organic morphology, frequently sensuous in form, and began to experiment with automatic composition (automatism).In 1925, he participated in the first Surrealist exhibition in Paris, before breaking with Surrealism to become a founder member of Abstraction-Creation in 1931, when his characteristic organic forms became more severe and geometrical. At a time when he began to turn towards full 3-D sculptures, Arp insisted that his sculpture was 'concrete' rather than 'abstract', since it occupied space, and that art was a natural generation of form: 'a fruit that grows in man', as he put it.

Price: 3500 USD

Location: Orange, California

End Time: 2024-12-28T07:31:13.000Z

Shipping Cost: N/A USD