Jean Arp: Making Something from Something…

Jean Arp - Torso, Navel, Mustache-Flower - 1930 - Oil on wood relief - 31 1/2 x 39 3/8 x 1 1/2 in. (80 x 100 x 3.8 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (click photo for larger image)German-French artist Jean Arp (also known as Hans Arp 1886-1966) could turn anything into a work of art—and that’s exactly what he did!

Although his work is non-representational, it is all rooted in nature and very organic in form. He was also one of the first artists to let chance and randomness become part of his work.

Arp is best known for his multilayered, painted wood reliefs. By the time Arp created the work featured here, he had already perfected his assemblage technique: he drew designs on cardboard templates and had a carpenter execute them in wood. 

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. In 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, 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 founding member of Dada in Zurich, and he participated in the Berlin Dada exhibition of 1920. Arp is also associated with the Surrealist movement.

Hannah Höch: Dealing Early with Feminist Issues

Hannah Höch - Dada Puppen (Dada Dolls) - 1916 - Fabric, yarn, thread, board, and beads - National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (click photo for larger image)German artist, Hannah Höch (1889-1978) was the only woman associated with the Berlin Dada group. She was best known for her provocative photomontage compositions, which explore Weimar-era perceptions of gender and ethnic differences. But Höch was also particularly interested in the representation of women as dolls, mannequins, and puppets—in essence, products for mass consumption. During her Dada period, she constructed and exhibited stuffed dolls that bore exaggerated and abstract features, but were clearly identifiable as female.

In 1920, the Dada group held the First International Dada Fair, which took on the traditional format of an art salon. But the walls of the site were plastered with posters and photomontages. Höch was allowed to participate only after her fellow artist and lover—Raoul Hausmann (also featured on this site)—threatened to withdraw his own work from the exhibition if she was kept out of it.

In the work featured here, these small-scale sculptural works suggest her awareness of Dada ideas more generally from its inception in 1916 in Zurich. She was likely influenced by writer Hugo Ball, the Zurich-based founder of Dada, given Höch's doll costumes' resemblance to the geometric forms of Ball's own costume worn in a seminal Dada performance at the Swiss nightclub Cabaret Voltaire.”

In 1934 Höch was pinpointed as a “cultural Bolshevist” by the Nazis. In order to continue to make art during World War II, she retreated to a cottage in Heiligensee, on the outskirts of Berlin, where she remained incognito until it was safe to resurface.

Raoul Hausmann: An Artist’s Art Critic

Raoul Hausmann - The Art Critic (Der Kunstkritiker) - 1919-20 - Lithograph and printed paper on paper - 318 x 254 mm - Tate Gallery, London (click photo for larger image)Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971) was an Austrian artist, who was a founder and central figure of the Dada movement in Berlin. He was known especially for his satirical photomontages and his provocative writings on art that decried the art establishment. He wrote for journals such as Die Aktion and Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm.  Dada artists and writers created provocative works that questioned capitalism and conformity, which they believed to be the fundamental motivations for the war that had just ended, and which had left chaos and destruction in its wake.

By 1918 Hausmann had already begun to work primarily in photomontage—composite collaged images made by juxtaposing and superimposing fragments of photos and text found in mass-media sources. It is commonly held that Hausmann and fellow artist Hannah Höch discovered photomontage while vacationing on the Baltic Sea, in the summer of 1918. 

In the work featured here, the 'art critic' is identified by a stamp as George Grosz, another member of the Dada group. But the image was probably an anonymous figure cut from a magazine. The fragment of a German banknote behind the critic’s neck suggests that he is controlled by capitalist forces. The words in the background are part of a poem poster made by Hausmann to be pasted on the walls of Berlin.

Jean Arp: Art Made of Anything

Jean Arp - Shirt Front and Fork 1922 - painted wood - inside the National Gallery of Art’s East Building, located on the National Mall, Washington. D.C. (click photo for larger image)Hans (Jean) Arp (1886-1966) was a French-German-American artist painter, sculptor, collagist and poet. Active in both the Dada and Surrealist movements, Arp was an artist who “could (and did) make anything into art. He’s among the first artists who regarded chance as a collaborator in the artistic process. He made it a point not to title his works until after they were completed, as a way of minimizing the influence of conscious mind on his art.

Arp’s works are abstract (as opposed to purely non-representational) and were always grounded in nature and reality. He was a master at placing recognizable forms into an unrecognizable context. Truly a “transitional figure” — Arp’s work forms a link between two of the most powerful movements of Modern Art.

A Muse for All Time…

Leonardo da Vinci ( 1452-1519) - Mona Lisa - 1503-1506 - Oil on wood - 77 x 53 cm (30 x 20 7/8 in.) Louvre, Paris (click photo for larger image)A muse artists have loved--and have loved to hate--for centuries! According to Vasari, this picture is a portrait of Mona or Monna (short for Madonna) Lisa, who was born in Florence in 1479 and in 1495 married the Marquese del Giocondo, a Florentine of some standing - hence the painting's other name, `La Gioconda'. This identification, however, has sometimes been questioned. It has been suggested that she was Giuliano de Medici’s (3rd son of Lorenzo de Medici) mistress and that he commissioned the painting. Taking a living model as his point of departure, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) has expressed in an ideal form the concept of balanced and integrated humanity. The smile stands for the movement of life, and the mystery of the soul. The misty blue mountains, towering above the plain and its river, symbolize the universe. The work redefined classical painting.

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) French Dada Artist - L.H.O.O.Q., 1919 - post card reproduction - 19.7 x 12.4 cm (approx. 7.75 x 4.8 in) - Philadelphia Museum of ArtMarcel Duchamp’s (1887-1968) piece, L.H.O.O.Q. (in French èl ache o o qu), is a pun, since the letters when pronounced in French form the sentence "Elle a chaud au cul", which can be roughly translated as "She has a hot ass". Duchamp himself confirmed this loose translation of the title. "L.H.O.O.Q." is also a pun in English as it can be pronounced as "look."  This work was first conceived in 1919. The work is one of what Duchamp referred to as “assisted readymades”.