Jean Arp — Profile, Rankings & Fame Trend

Summary

Updated 2026-06-10

He dissolved the boundary between accident and intention — one of Dada's original circle, then a sculptor who let chance carve the form.

Biography

About

Born Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp on 16 September 1886, he moved between German and French identities as easily as he moved between mediums. He joined the Dadaists when the movement was still a Zurich café provocation, using chance operations and torn paper to mock the idea that art required control. Later he turned to sculpture and abstraction, shaping organic forms that seemed to have grown rather than been made. He worked in paint, in verse, in wood and stone. He died on 7 June 1966, having spent sixty years proving that art could be serious about not being serious.

Voice

In their own words

Sourced, dated quotes from Jean Arp

Jean Arp

said1948

Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts.

— Dadaland (1948); Quoted in: Cosana Maria Eram (2010) The autobiographical pact: otherness and redemption in four French avant-garde

Jean Arp

said1948

As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface..

— Hans Arp's quote on drawing on the black surface; as quoted in Search for the Real, Hans Hofmann, Addison Gallery of modern Art, 1948

Jean Arp

said1932

A painting or sculpture not modeled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone..

— Notes From a Dada Diary, published in 1932; as quoted by Anna Moszynska, in Abstract Art, Thames and Hudson, London, 1990, p. 113

Jean Arp

said1931

Concretion signifies the material process of condensation, hardening, coagulating, thickening, growing together. Concretion designates the solidification of a mass.

— Jean Arp (1931), as quoted in: Eric Robertson (2006) Arp: Painter, Poet, Sculptor, p. 108

Jean Arp

said1930