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Lot Essay
Conceived in 1959, Figure-germe dite l'après-midinette embodies the lyrical beauty and purity of expression that characterised Jean Arp’s mature sculptural language. After devoting himself principally to relief sculpture throughout his DADA and Surrealist years, Arp found himself drawn to the expanded volumes of sculpture in the round during the 1930s. ‘Suddenly my need for interpretation vanished,’ he later explained, ‘and the body, the form, the supremely perfected work became everything to me’ (Arp, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p. 14). Finding a touchstone in the eternal process of nature, the sculptures from the second half of Arp’s career explore infinite variations on this theme, instinctively recasting its elemental motifs – organic bodies, biological shapes – into new, boldly abstract iterations.
Arp was fascinated by the complex relationship between man, nature and the material world, but remained adamant that this style evoked natural forms without imitation. ‘We do not want to copy nature. We do not want to reproduce, we want to produce,’ he wrote. ‘We want to produce like a plant that produces a fruit... We want to produce directly and not through tricks... These paintings, these sculptures – these objects – should remain anonymous in nature’s enormous studio, like clouds, mountains, seas, animals, people’ (quoted in Jean Arp : from the collections of Mme. Marguerite Arp and Arthur and Madeleine Lejwa, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1972, n.p.). Indeed, it was the essential spirit of nature, its unseen, driving forces that stood at the core of his creative vision. Rooted in evocative forms that teasingly hint at figurative meanings yet remain ultimately elusive, Arp’s sculptures seem animated from within, embracing a formal vocabulary inspired by the central concepts of growth, transience, evolution, entropy and metamorphosis that rule the ebb and flow of all life on earth.
For Arp, an important route to achieving this lay in his belief that a sculpture should be appreciated in the round, from a multitude of angles, its profile shifting and changing as the viewer moved around the piece, just as would be possible when observing plants, stones, leaves or shells in nature. In Figure-germe dite l'après-midinette he appears to focus on the initial seed of an idea that has taken root in his imagination – the very beginnings of a three dimensional figure, expressed in an elegant, elongated form that boasts a subtle voluptuousness, its undulating, rounded volumes suggesting the first vestiges of a body. There is a dynamic tension within the bronze, caught between a sense of organic spontaneity and carefully orchestrated form, deliberately shaped by the artist’s hand.
While Arp admired the sculptural principles of Constantin Brancusi, and in particular his promotion of direct carving, his own working process saw him produce three-dimensional sculptures in plaster before the forms were translated into stone or bronze. Having first learned the technique from the Swiss artist Fritz Huf before the outbreak of the First World War, he returned to this form of modelling in the latter-half of his career because it allowed for greater versatility. Typically beginning a piece by building up shapes with wet plaster, then carving and smoothing the forms when dry, Arp’s method was one of continual adjustment, allowing for large alterations of form as well as more subtle changes along the way, as he sought to create artworks that appeared to have been created by natural forces rather than his own hand. ‘I let my work guide me and I trust it,’ Arp explained. ‘I do not ponder. While I keep working, friendly, strange, angry, inexplicable silent, sleep forms spring forth. They form themselves as if without my doing. I seem only to be moving my hands’ (quoted in Jean Arp, exh. cat., Chalette, New York, 1965, n.p.).
Arp was fascinated by the complex relationship between man, nature and the material world, but remained adamant that this style evoked natural forms without imitation. ‘We do not want to copy nature. We do not want to reproduce, we want to produce,’ he wrote. ‘We want to produce like a plant that produces a fruit... We want to produce directly and not through tricks... These paintings, these sculptures – these objects – should remain anonymous in nature’s enormous studio, like clouds, mountains, seas, animals, people’ (quoted in Jean Arp : from the collections of Mme. Marguerite Arp and Arthur and Madeleine Lejwa, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1972, n.p.). Indeed, it was the essential spirit of nature, its unseen, driving forces that stood at the core of his creative vision. Rooted in evocative forms that teasingly hint at figurative meanings yet remain ultimately elusive, Arp’s sculptures seem animated from within, embracing a formal vocabulary inspired by the central concepts of growth, transience, evolution, entropy and metamorphosis that rule the ebb and flow of all life on earth.
For Arp, an important route to achieving this lay in his belief that a sculpture should be appreciated in the round, from a multitude of angles, its profile shifting and changing as the viewer moved around the piece, just as would be possible when observing plants, stones, leaves or shells in nature. In Figure-germe dite l'après-midinette he appears to focus on the initial seed of an idea that has taken root in his imagination – the very beginnings of a three dimensional figure, expressed in an elegant, elongated form that boasts a subtle voluptuousness, its undulating, rounded volumes suggesting the first vestiges of a body. There is a dynamic tension within the bronze, caught between a sense of organic spontaneity and carefully orchestrated form, deliberately shaped by the artist’s hand.
While Arp admired the sculptural principles of Constantin Brancusi, and in particular his promotion of direct carving, his own working process saw him produce three-dimensional sculptures in plaster before the forms were translated into stone or bronze. Having first learned the technique from the Swiss artist Fritz Huf before the outbreak of the First World War, he returned to this form of modelling in the latter-half of his career because it allowed for greater versatility. Typically beginning a piece by building up shapes with wet plaster, then carving and smoothing the forms when dry, Arp’s method was one of continual adjustment, allowing for large alterations of form as well as more subtle changes along the way, as he sought to create artworks that appeared to have been created by natural forces rather than his own hand. ‘I let my work guide me and I trust it,’ Arp explained. ‘I do not ponder. While I keep working, friendly, strange, angry, inexplicable silent, sleep forms spring forth. They form themselves as if without my doing. I seem only to be moving my hands’ (quoted in Jean Arp, exh. cat., Chalette, New York, 1965, n.p.).