Étoile

Both a poet and an artist, Jean Arp devoted himself principally to relief sculpture in the first decades of his career, before becoming increasingly drawn to the expanded volumes of three-dimensional sculptures in the 1930s. Transforming the flat, biomorphic shapes of his earlier reliefs into fully-fledged, freestanding sculptural creations, Arp arrived at a language of burgeoning organic forms that served as the wellspring of his art for the rest of his life. Conceived in 1939, and carved from smooth marble in 1960, Etoile (Star) is a prime example of the dynamic, sinuous forms of Arp’s sculptural language, capturing the spirit of invention and transformation that led Alfred H. Barr to proclaim the artist ‘a one-man laboratory for the discovery of new forms’ (quoted in E. Trier, M. Arp-Hagenbach and F. Arp, eds., Jean Arp, Sculpture: His Last Ten Years, New York, 1968, p. xi).
Arp had been one of the pioneers of the Dada movement in Zurich during the First World War, before moving back to Paris in the mid-1920s, where his neighbours included Joan Miró and Max Ernst. Arp, like the Surrealists, pursued the practice of ‘automatism,’ seeking to enable the creative dominance of the subconscious. André Breton, one of the founders of the initially literary movement, admired Arp’s poetry as well as his visual art, referring to his automatic drawings and wood reliefs of the 1920s as ‘the most liberated and newest offering of the present time’ (quoted in E. Robertson, Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor, New Haven and London, 2006, p. 68). Over the course of the 1920s, Arp’s affinity with Surrealism strengthened, and while his relationship with Breton cooled in the following decade as the group became increasingly political, the artist acknowledged in 1954 that the aesthetic tenets of the movement remained influential throughout his oeuvre.
Arp was fascinated by form and its metamorphic potential, an obsession that evolved through his biomorphic reliefs and collages, and culminated with his freestanding sculpture. He began creating amoebic forms around 1916, and these evocative organic shapes have come to characterise his pictorial output. Inspired by the physiological processes of growth, procreation, and death, Arp’s works are imbued with the transmutative and the indeterminate. The artist only titled his work post-completion, a decision that, as Janet Landay acknowledges, thereby eliminated ‘the interference of the conscious mind, something which his fellow Surrealist artists also experimented with’ (‘Between Art and Nature: The Metamorphic Sculpture of Jean Arp,’ in Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts, vol. 61, no. 4, 1984, p. 18). By thus allowing his creativity to freely take hold, with no one subject pre-determined, the sculpture could in fact assume a plethora of identities simultaneously.
Etoile, which translates to ‘star’ in English, immediately evokes ideas of the cosmic and celestial, as five conical forms extend outwards, fluidly morphing from a central ring of smooth stone. The radiant white sculpture appears to balance on one prong of these extremities, and combined with the undulating curves and points of the sculpture, the present work seems weightless. This apparent lightness is contrasted by the gravity of the medium, the elemental, heavy marble made dynamic and airy. Yet, as with many of Arp’s sculptures, there is a metamorphic aspect to Etoile, and with its five appendages, there is perhaps a figurative quality to the work too, an abstracted anthropomorphic form, arms outstretched and balancing on one leg, like a prima ballerina, a danseuse étoile.
In the 1930s, Arp became increasingly occupied with nature, working with a renewed emphasis on the unity of humanity and the cosmos. The artist felt that the relationship between nature and mankind was rupturing, and saw art as a way to explore this, declaring ‘man must once again become part of nature… Concrete art wishes to transform the world… It urges man to identify himself with nature’ (quoted in M. Andreotti, ‘A New Unity of Man and Nature: Jean Arp’s Growth of 1938,’ in Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 16. no. 2, 1990, p. 134). Against an already tense political background that was worsening with the looming threat of the Second World War, Arp created art that affirmed his living values, looking to the natural world and the continual change it brought about, and it was in this context, in 1939, that the motif of Etoile was first conceived. The artist sought, in his own words, to make ‘an elementary, natural, healthy, art, which causes the stars of peace, love and poetry to grow in the head and heart’ (quoted in ibid., p. 137).
Awed by the all-encompassing power of the cosmos and the relentless cyclical processes of the natural world, Arp looked to express the universality of nature in his art. Seeking a way to embody and represent universal forces through visual form or symbol, he had long embraced elliptical and circular forms in his reliefs, drawings, and collages, describing them as ‘fluid ovals, symbols of the metamorphosis and becoming of bodies’ (quoted in ibid., p. 179). These rounded forms also imply endless movement, and by hollowing out the centres of these forms in his three-dimensional sculptures, Arp heightened the sense of the infinite that emanated from his work. The ring-like structures of sculptures such as Etoile, Couronne de bourgeons I (1936, Hartog and Fischer, no. 30), Couronne de bourgeons II (1936, Hartog and Fischer, no. 31) and Lingam (1939, Hartog and Fischer, no. 60) incessantly pulse with the cyclical essence of eternity, their circular cores meaning they have no beginning and no end. They exist as materialisations of infinity, their forms repeating themselves limitlessly as the viewer’s eye follows the eternally continuing structure.
Arp’s freestanding sculptures were inextricably intertwined with nature, their final organic forms the result of the artist’s process, which in itself mimicked nature. Building up shapes with wet plaster, Arp would carve and configure forms as the plaster dried, and then repeat, adding more plaster, reforming and reshaping the sculpture again and again, until he reached a completed work. In continually adjusting the work, alternating between modelling and carving, between adding and reducing, Arp imitated the unceasing evolution of nature. The versatility of plaster allowed him perpetual creative freedom, enabling a fluidity of form and encouraging the metamorphic potential of the sculpture. As the artist explained his process: ‘A small fragment of one of my sculptures presenting a curve or a contrast that moves me, is often the germ of a new sculpture. I intensify the curve or contrast, and this engenders new forms. Among those new forms, some – for example – grow more rapidly and more strongly than others. I let them grow until the original forms have become secondary and almost expressionless. Finally I suppress one of the secondary and expressionless forms so that the others become more apparent. It often takes me months, years to complete a sculpture. I work until enough of my life has flowed into its body’ (quoted in M. Andreotti, op. cit., 1990, p. 145).
After completing a work in plaster, Arp kept it in his studio, creating a version in a more durable material if he wished to exhibit it, or when a collector expressed an interest. The transformative process continued therefore, as Arp made further versions of the initial motifs, which often vary in size and medium. Etoile, for example, was conceived in plaster in 1939, and Arp made multiple marble versions of this, before returning to the motif in the 1940s and 1950; creating a larger plaster, and then casting this enlarged version in bronze. Including the artist’s base, the present Etoile stands at one metre in height, and was completed in 1960, the only sculpture of the motif in this size. Thereby it is unique among the Etoile series. Acquired directly from the artist by Pierre Loeb, the pivotal gallerist who hosted the first Surrealist exhibition in 1925, Etoile possesses an innate and elemental purity of form, a celestial luminosity combined with the quarried earthly stone.