THE CASE FOR ARP
Hans Arp: Heads or Tails
Hauser and Wirth, 542 W 22nd St.
By Gwenaël Kerlidou, October 1, 2026
Chair and bottle, 1926, paint on cardboard, 19” x 21-7/8” (framed), © Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth / ProLitteris, Zurich, ARS, New York, and DACS, London. Courtesy Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth and Hauser & Wirth
These days, some of us may conveniently project a lot more coherence and homogeneity onto the art movements of the last century than they most likely ever had in their own time: A testimony to the resilience of the intellectual constructs helping us make sense of our lives. At the beginning of this new art season, a reminder of the gap between historical reality and contemporary perception can be found in the coincidence, a few months apart, of two very different exhibitions bringing the legacy of Dada back to the fore: Following the Duchamp retrospective at MoMA, and before the opening of its second part in Philadelphia, the Hauser and Wirth gallery in New York presents a short survey of Hans Arp’s work, a pivotal figure of the Dada Zurich art-scene during the first world-war. Even if both Duchamp and Arp emerged from the same historical anti-war Dada moment, they had actually so little in common that their ultimate contributions to the cultural project which we now call modern art couldn’t be more different from each other. Perhaps does it boil down to Duchamp’s basic mistrust of the world of forms and colors, which on the contrary, Arp embraced fully from an exuberantly ludic angle.
Hans/Jean Arp (1886-1966) was born in Strasburg when the city and the region of Alsace, now part of France, belonged to the Prussian Second Reich and spoke German, between 1871 and 1918. In 1916, at the time of the Dada beginnings at Cabaret Voltaire, he was exiled in Switzerland. Germany and France, the two countries constituting his cultural background were in the middle of a devastating war with each other over the territory of his birth.
If, beyond their shared opposition to the war, when the arbitrariness of death in war could only be matched by arbitrariness of meaning in art, as much as Duchamp did, Arp invoked the rejection of Cubism as one of the initial reasons for his Dada rebellion (although in his case it was more specifically against trompe l’oeil and symmetry), their ultimate motives diverged widely. While Duchamp’s irony was aimed at the absurdity of the bourgeois socio-economic values (marriage, celibacy, sexual repression, etc.) and at the growing cubist dogmas, Arp’s humor was directed at the conventional boundaries of the creative process.
One of the reasons Arp’s version of Dada deviated so early from Duchamp’s may simply be a question of bilingualism versus monolingualism and monoculturalism. Duchamp’s literary symbolism, his puns and word-plays, only functioned within a monolinguistic cultural environment expected to be somewhat homogeneous. While Arp’s own relationship to culture, straddling two different countries, in a continual back and forth between national languages, transposed that shift into a constant toggling between artistic languages, as demonstrated by his early reliefs’ mingling of the two academically distinct categories of painting and sculpture.
Like Duchamp, Arp left the Dada label behind fairly early. His long career spanned from Dada and Surrealism to Cercle et Carré (1929-1930), up to the Abstraction-Création movement (1931-1936) and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles (1946-56), to his commercial success of the nineteen sixties. Between 1914 and 1966, he was an active participant to every new art movement on the forefront of the avant-garde. At the time it wasn’t rare for modern artists to join movements which may now seem ideologically incompatible (such as Surrealism and geometric abstraction, for example) and which ended up imploding one after the other under the weight of their own contradictions. It may have been more important for these artists to be part of the ever-evolving avant-garde than to claim exclusive allegiance to a trendy specific art movement.
Besides the innovative use in his early work of the laws of chance (the arbitrariness of meaning), what may have turned out to be the most “Dada” aspect of Arp’s work may just have been the unresolved qualities of the early wall-reliefs as neither painting nor sculpture. With the passage of time, these unpretentious small painted wood constructions would remain the most compelling part of his production precisely because of that inspired mixing of the genres.
Arp’s first reliefs of 1917 were a breakthrough on the same level as Picasso and Braque’s first collages of 1914. At the height of the new interest for geometric abstraction, in Wassily Kandinsky’s wake and as an alternative to the Cubist lineage, he championed biomorphic abstraction, organic forms and the subversive power of the arabesque as viable alternatives to the systematic rigidity of geometry.
Later his influence would range from Miro (whose 1939 Constellations echo Arp’s earlier ones from 1932) and Yves Tanguy, to Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Myron Stout, all the way to Ellsworth Kelly and Francois Morellet’s use of the laws of chance in some of their work. But more than the debates over painting as sculpture (or vice-versa), it is the oncoming discussions of painting as object that Arp anticipated. The reliefs were forerunners of some of the argumentation that Donald Judd would later develop with his concept of the specific object (objects which are neither paintings nor sculptures). While at the same time their sheer humorous wackiness, which they shared with Paul Klee, connected them to some aspects of Pop Art.
Allongée (Reclining), cast in 1960, bronze, 25-5/8” x 40-3/8” x 4-1/8”, © Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth / ProLitteris, Zurich, ARS, New York, and DACS, London. Courtesy Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by the author.
Siamois (Siamese), 1960, cast in 1984, bronze, 15” x 29-7/8” x 4-1/8”, © Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth / ProLitteris, Zurich, ARS, New York, and DACS, London. Courtesy Stiftung Arp e.V., Berlin/Rolandswerth and Hauser & Wirth. Photo by the author.
And, when mounted directly on the wall, without a rectangular ground, the reliefs also worked as shaped paintings ahead of their time; Except for the fact that, with their thick layering, they did not quite fit Clement Greenberg’s idea of planarity. But, if Arp seems to be such a blind spot in Greenberg’s narrative, it is more likely because his allegiance to Dada, Surrealism and to the laws of chance as precursors to the introduction of the notion of the unconscious in art, rendered him suspect in the eyes of the narrow-minded formalist critic. Some occasional reliefs, where Arp introduced holes revealing the wall behind them, such as “Horloge”, 1924, for example (not in the show), could even be construed as prefiguring Deconstruction.
In the early nineteen twenties, in the context of what art historians labelled “a return to order”, a general trend back towards more conservative values in art after the first world-war, partly prompted by Brancusi’s mix of fluid and geometric forms, Arp started to focus increasingly on sculpture in the round. As New York based French sculptor Alain Kirili used to say, referring to the often-truncated aspect of his shapes : « Arp is at his best when he cuts/slices … ». But with the passage of time, these sculptures in the round would turn out to be perhaps the least interesting part of his work.
Arp’s well-known quote : “We don’t want to copy nature. We don’t want to reproduce; we want to produce … like a plant produces a fruit”, which equated artistic creation with natural processes and summed up his esthetic credo, brings to mind « I am nature », Jackson Pollock’s memorable response to Hans Hoffman. In fact, the place of nature in the modern art debate goes back to Spinoza’s seventeenth century’s conception of nature as the embodiment of god and to his distinction between “naturing” (creating) nature and “natured” (represented) nature -Cubism still followed the latter option. Spinoza’s categories of “naturing” and “natured” could be seen today as the first formulation of Ferdinand de Saussure’s early twentieth century linguistic distinction between the referent (nature), the signifier (naturing) and the signified (natured).
Pollock’s response highlights the connection of Abstract Expressionism, especially via its revival of the idea of the sublime, to German expressionism and its idealization of nature, at least as much as to the Picasso -Matisse lineage. Even Kelly’s own process of abstracting shapes (which is transparent in the relationship of his paintings to his photographs) underlines this paradigmatic approach of modern art to nature. Arp’s emphasis on the laws of chance may have been his attempt at extricating art from its traditional paradigm of nature as model. If yesterday’s modern artist could claim: “I’m nature” (understood as the creative process, or rather as the creation of meaning), today’s postmodern artist might respond to it with: “I’m culture” (understood as critical discourse on the production/reception of meaning).
The more one looks at the dates on the works, the more there is a growing sense that Arp never received his proper due, at least in the “modernist” narrative, and especially in relation to Matisse’s paper cut-outs. Even if Matisse was cutting in pre-painted sheets of paper while Arp was post-painting pre-assembled cut -out wood shapes, he was a direct antecedent to Matisse’s cut-outs from the late nineteen-forties, particularly in his more organic motifs, a connection which surprisingly has not been explored yet.
The high point of the show is a series of “sliced” pieces from the late nineteen fifties-early sixties, such as “Siamese” or “Reclining”, collectively referred to as the Threshold series; bronze sculptures with two vertical planes parallel to the wall, which seem to reintroduce the planar vocabulary of the wall reliefs in 3D space. They somehow seem more conclusive that the sculptures in the round.
Unfortunately, none of the early wall-reliefs were included in the exhibition, apart from the late, uncharacteristically large and systematic “Symmetrical Triptych” (1950) in the gallery entrance, but “Chair and Bottle” (1926), the earliest and best piece of the show by far, with its unexpected irregular horizontal gap at the top exposing the wall behind it, gave a glimpse of Arp’s smart mischievousness at its best.
Symmetrical Triptych, 1950, Painted wood relief, 3 parts, each 47” x 39-1/8” x 1-1/2”, © 2026 ProLitteris, Zurich, ARS, New York, and DACS, London. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, photo: Felix Jungo