ARP. PAINTER POET SCULPTOR

HANS (JEAN) ARP (1887-1966)

 REVIEWS:
'Robertson interprets Arp by deploying the language and method of theorists inspired by Saussurian structuralism - Foucault, Derrida, Eco and Barthes. ... This approach can assist in understanding the complexity of Arp's formal innovations... There are a host of genuine insights.' - Corinna Lotz, Apollo Magazine

DESCRIPTION:
Hans, or Jean, Arp (1886-1966) is internationally renowned as one of the foremost sculptors and visual artists of the twentieth century. He was a founder member of the Dada group, but he was also associated with Surrealism and, through the groups Cercle et Carre and Abstraction-Creation, with Concrete Art and Minimalism. Such acclaim has overshadowed the fact that he considered himself above all a poet. This book, the first major English-language monograph on Arp for nearly half a century, is also the first to reveal Arp's practices as poet, painter and sculptor to be not only complementary but mutually dependent facets of a coherent aesthetic strategy. Eric Robertson shows how Arp's practice, throughout his career, of moving freely between his different expressive forms and his two languages (French and German), and his tendency to alter his earlier works, both complicate the bibliographer's task and stimulate the interest of the reader and spectator. In its eclecticism, its playful refusal of fixity, its preoccupation with notions of framing, and its disregard for the aura traditionally associated with the original, Arp's creative oeuvre challenges and often transcends traditional categories of description. Examining major works in the light of recent critical and theoretical perspectives, Robertson also considers the extent to which Arp's resistance to single, reductive interpretations may be linked to his bilingual, bicultural upbringing in Alsace and his experience of two world wars. In the context of the above, the book addresses three key questions: to what extent can Arp's practices as poet, painter and sculptor be seen as not only complementary, but interdependent? What are the implications of Arp's bilingualism for his visual and textual art, his aversion to semantic closure, and his rejection of the finished work in all his creative enterprises? To what extent do his practices of transfer across genres, interdiscursivity and interlingual wordplay call for a reappraisal of Arp's relationship to the avant-gardes and his standing in twentieth-century European art-historical and literary contexts?

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY:
Eric Robertson is Senior Lecturer in French, Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Writing Between the Lines: Rene Schickele, 'Citoyen francais, deutscher Dichter' (1883-1940) (1995).