Multi tasker
Tom Rosenthal
Jean Arp: L'invention de la forme Pubis des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, until 6 June
Brussels, with its faintly schizophrenic bilingual culture, seems the perfect location for a major Arp retrospective. Hans (Jean) Arp was born in 1886 in Strasbourg when it was still a German city, to a German father and a French-Alsatian mother and, having settled in Paris, became a French national in 1926. In many ways his life and art spanned several of the key movements of the last century before he died, in Basel, in 1966.
He was an early collaborator in Expressionism, being involved with the Blaue Reiter in Munich (he had a lifelong admiration for Kandinsky). and Der Sturm in Berlin. He was a pioneer abstractionist, a founder member of Dada in Zurich, a member of the Surrealist movement — there's a wonderful group photograph of Arp with Breton, Ernst, Dail et al. — and a Constructivist. In fact, he was involved with so many styles that one can't help wondering whether he was a Jack of all the big movements and, perhaps, a master of none. This is possibly unfair since it could be simply that, having mastered some new technique, he was so easily bored and his mind so fertile that he felt compelled to move on to something else. Yet he was, in several ways, a precursor. He was making elaborate collages in 1915 and 1916; his wood reliefs indubitably influenced both Ben Nicholson and Victor Pasmore. His papiers coupes and dechires preceded, albeit on a smaller and more intimate scale, those of Matisse. Some of his sculptural forms, such as 'Ptolemee I' of 1953, might have been made by Barbara Hepworth in her prime.
Indeed Herbert Read, in his excellent book on Arp, quotes a tribute by Hepworth who had visited Arp's studio a day after she had been to that of Brancusi: 'Seeing Jean Arp's work for the first time freed me of many inhibitions and this helped me to see the figure in landscape with new eyes. .. . Arp had fused landscape with the human form in so extraordinary a manner. ... I began to imagine the earth rising and becoming human.'
Read took the view that Arp's style was formed before he could have met Brancusi or seen his works and he knew of no positive evidence of direct contact. But I can't help feeling, not least because I saw this Brussels exhibition within days of revelling in the Brancusi show at Tate Modern, that Brancusi has the edge.
This is particularly so when they essay similar themes, whether the placing of several sculpted blocks in columnar form or the sexually ambiguous, free-form pieces, partly phallic and partly female. The Arps are always interesting, because he was so taken with biomorphism, but rarely beautiful, whereas Brancusi, while less biomorphic in his androgynous figures, could sometimes make you gasp at their sheer beauty.
Having said that, it is also clear from this large show — some 140 works — that Arp's biomorphic interest gave him a huge aesthetic freedom and a quite Jungian sense of natural and archetypal forms.
In his inherent playfulness, emphasised in his verse which is liberally quoted in the excellent catalogue, there is a parallel with Mini and some of the painted, multi-lay ered wood reliefs such as 'Le Cerf' or `Torse A la tete de fleur' of 1924 are like Mir& executed in three dimensions. They combine Arp's free-form, sculptural explorations with Miro's vivid use of flat colours. Sometimes his wry inventiveness is loaded with humour such as in 'Horloge', which is indeed a clock-face but is also, inescapably, a sperm going about its business. At other times one gets a series of abstractions which resemble Rorschach tests elevated into an art form.
My favourite among the wood reliefs is 'Femme amphore' of 1929, a beautiful, perfectly executed abstraction of an amphora shape, in a reddish ochre on an almost black background, framed in grey. In the centre of the amphora's belly is a cut-out relief, like a gingerbread woman; so that what you also see is an upright foetus in a womb. This is one of his most literal ideas. He's more usually deeply in touch with the free-form amoebic shapes which suit his often dreamlike, i.e., Surrealist, images. The Beaux-Arts has given us a fine and valuable perspective of the work of a poetic artist who was at once thoughtful and playful and, therefore, ultimately lifeenhancing.
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