Lot 1 | Fronde et nombrils

ARP, HANS (JEAN)
1886 Strasbourg - 1966 Basel

Title: Fronde et nombrils.
Date: 1926.
Technique: Oil on cardboard, cut out.
Measurement : 62 x 50cm.
Notation: Signed verso: H Arp.
Frame/Pedestal: Framed.

Provenance:
- Corporate collection Germany

Exhibitions:
- Museum Würth, Künzelsau 1994
- Kunstmuseum Bern, 1988
- Foundation Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp e.V., Bahnhof Rolandseck, 1988-89
- Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal 1989, cat. 48
- Museo Espanol de Arte Contemporáneo, Madrid 1985, cat. 67
- Hayward Gallery, London 1978, cat. 9.1
- Musée Despiau-Wlérick, Mont-de-Marsan, 1977 (label)
- Galerie Denise René, Paris 1974

Literature:
- Rau, Bernd (ed.): Hans Arp - Die Reliefs. Oeuvre-Katalog, Stuttgart 1981, p. 55, cat. rais. no. 100, ill.

The German-French artist Hans Arp, who later calls himself Jean Arp, is one of the most famous and exciting artists of the 20th century avant-garde. The painter, poet and sculptor is a pioneer of abstract art and co-founder of the Dada movement in Zurich in 1916. He is in exchange with artist colleagues who belong to the Constructivists, the group called "Der Blaue Reiter" (the blue rider) or the Surrealists. Turning away from traditional, academic art, the work of the autodidact Arp is characterized by the search for new, unconventional forms of expression, leaving a great deal of space for the principle of chance. Characteristic for his works are biomorphic formations. Through these organic, often round and ovoid structures inspired by nature, archetypal forms are created, which should be intuitively comprehensible to the viewer.

The painting presented here dates from 1926, when Hans Arp became a French citizen and moved to Strasbourg with his wife Sophie Taeuber-Arp. In the 1920s the artist focused on paintings, collages and reliefs before turning increasingly to sculpture from the 1930s onwards.

Inconcrete, abstract forms are set here over a three-part brown-black-and-white background. But in front of each background part the forms act differently and change colour, so that they seem to interweave with the background. The result is an accentuation of the colour boundaries and a kind of positive-negative play that culminates in the cut-out segment in the centre left - a blank space that could be filled with brown, black, blue or rather our imagination.
Just like the image, the word is also of great importance to the visual artist and poet, and he often uses collage-like techniques in his poems as well as in his pictorial works. Through the title, language is part of this work as well and allows concrete forms to emerge from inconcrete ones. "Fronde et nombrils" is the name of this painting and turns the forked element into a slingshot and the dots into stones. But the circles are also "nombrils", the bellybuttons. Thus, the title points to the origin of life, to the archetypal, but through the word "fronde", which could also be translated as "revolt" in addition to "slingshot", it also points to Arp's constant efforts to fundamentally change art.