Jean Arp citáty

„Umění je plod, který v člověku roste jako plod na rostlině nebo jako dítě v matčině lůně.“

„Šílenství a vraždění už byly rozpoutány, když se dada roku 1916 vynořilo z temných hlubin Curychu. … Dada chtělo vytrhnout lidstvo z jeho ubohé neschopnosti a zachránit lidi před zuřivým šílenstvím válečné doby.“

„Produkovat tak, jako rostlina produkuje plod, ne reprodukovat.“

Zdroj: [Míka, Robert, Uragán dadaismu změnil před 100 lety pohled na umění i svět, archiweb.cz, 2016-02-02, 2016-04-01, http://www.archiweb.cz/news.php?action=show&id=18875&type=2]

„Umělecké tvoření by se nemělo nazývat prací, nýbrž uměním. U lásky mluvíme také spíše o snu než-li o práci.“

Zdroj: [Pijoan, José, Dějiny umění 10, Knižní klub, 2000, 80-242-0218-2, 79, česky]

„Umělecké tvoření by se nemělo nazývat prací, nýbrž uměním.“

“We do not wish to copy nature. We do not want to reproduce, we want to produce. We want to produce as a plant produces a fruit and does not itself reproduce.”

Jean Arp: Citáty anglicky

“I wanted to find another order, another value for man in nature. He should no longer be the measure of all things”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 183: Serge Fauchereau (1988) in Arp, p. 20 commented: 'Even though his work was nonrepresentational, Arp disapproved of the term 'abstract art' being applied to it, as he often explained with the above quote'.
Kontext: We do not wish to copy nature. We do not want to reproduce, we want to produce. We want to produce as a plant produces a fruit and does not itself reproduce. We want to produce directly and without meditation. As there is not the least trace of abstraction in this art, we will call it concrete art.

“The philosophers are of less use to Dada than an old toothbrush, and it leaves them on the scrap heap for the great leaders of the world.”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 183
Kontext: I wanted to find another order, another value for man in nature. He should no longer be the measure of all things, nor should everything be compared with him, but, on the contrary, all things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure. I wanted to create new appearances, to extract new forms from man. This is made clear in my objects from 1917.

“Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 63
Kontext: Dada was given the Venus of Milo a clyster and has allowed the Laocoön and his sons to rest awhile, after thousands of years of struggle with the good sausage Python. The philosophers are of less use to Dada than an old toothbrush, and it leaves them on the scrap heap for the great leaders of the world.

“Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe.”

quote in Arp on Arp: poems, essays, memories, Viking, 1972, p. 231
Attributed from posthumous publications
Kontext: Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.

“I like nature but not its substitutes. Naturalist art, illusionism, is a substitute for nature.”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 315
Kontext: Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man's vanity to be loathsome.

“In 1915 Sophie Taeuber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper [without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting]. These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous.”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 359
Kontext: I like nature but not its substitutes. Naturalist art, illusionism, is a substitute for nature. I remember that in arguing with Piet Mondrian [in Paris, 1920's], he opposed art to nature saying that art is artificial and nature is natural. I do not share this opinion. I do not think that nature is in natural opposition to art. Art's origins are natural.

“art is fruit growing out of man like the fruit out of a plant like the child out of the mother. While the fruit of the plant grows independent forms and never resembles a balloon or a president in a cutaway suit the artistic fruit of man shows for the most part a ridiculous resemblance to the appearance of other things. Reason tells man to stand above nature and to be the measure of all things. thus man thinks he is able to live and to create against the laws of nature and he creates abortions. through reason man became a tragic and ugly figure. i dare say he would create even his children in the form of vases with umbilical cords if he could do so. reason has cut man off from nature.”

on creating art without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting, in The Art of Jean Arp, Herbert Read, Abrams, New York 1968, p. p. 34, 38
1960s

“These paintings, these sculptures – these objects – should remain anonymous, in the great workshop of nature, like the clouds, the mountains, the seas, the animals, and man himself. Yes! Man should go back to nature! Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages.”

Arp wrote this in lowercase letters
Notes From a Dada Diary; published, 1932 in 'Transition magazine'; as quoted (in lowercase letters), “Soby, James Thrall. Arp: The Museum of Modern Art. Doubleday, New York, 1958, Print. p. 17
1930s

“By the time I was 16, the everlasting copying of stuffed birds and withered flowers at the Strasbourg School of Applied Art not only poisoned drawing for me but destroyed my taste for all artistic activity. I took refuge in poetry.”

In 1915, w:Otto van Rees, A.C. van Rees, Freundlich, S. Taeuber [his wife] and Arp made an attempt of this sort, as Arp mentioned himself.
Zdroj: 1940s, Abstract Art, Concrete Art (c. 1942), p. 118

“At daybreak I found on my sculptor's turntable a little mischievous form [a small plaster form of Impish Form, Arp made in 1949], alert and somewhat obese, with a stomach like a lute. It seemed to me like an imp. I called it that. And all of a sudden one day this little character, this imp, through a Venezuelan medium, found itself to be the father of a giant [Arp enlarged it]. This giant son resembles its father like an egg resembles another egg, a fig another fig, a bell another bell.”

Looking, Arp, Jean; as quoted by Soby, James Thrall. Arp: The Museum of Modern Art. Doubleday, New York, 1958, Print. p. 12
1960s

“These collages were static symmetrical constructions, portico's with pathetic vegetation, the gateway to the realm of dreams. They were done with colored paper in black, orange or blue dye plates. Although cubist painting interested me very much, not a trace of their influence was to be found in my collages.”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 431

“Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds.”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 420 - quote on his early collages, Hans Arp made ca. 1914.

“Ever since my childhood, I was haunted by the search for perfection. An imperfectly cut paper literally made me ill, I would guillotine it. My collages came undone, they became blistered. I then introduced death and decay in my compositions. I reacted by avoiding any precision from one day to another. Instead of cutting the paper, I would tear it with my hands.”

Dadaland (1948); Quoted in: Cosana Maria Eram (2010) The autobiographical pact: otherness and redemption in four French avant-garde artists, p. 20
Quote of Jean Arp, referring to Swiss Dada in Zurich after 1914.
1940s

“In the good times of Dada, we detested polished works, the distracted air of spiritual struggle, the titans, and we rejected them with all out being.”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 431

“As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface... Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface.”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 307

“Structures of lines, surfaces, forms, colours. They try to approach the eternal, the inexpressible above men. They are a denial of human egotism. They are the hatred of human immodesty, the hatred of images, of paintings.. Wisdom [is] the feeling for the coming reality, the mystical, the definite indefinite, the greatest definite.”

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
1940s

“Each one of these bodies [art-works which Arp made] certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.”

Arp's quote from his text in a catalogue of his exhibition, in Zürich 1915; quoted by Arp himself in his text 'Abstract Art, Concrete Art,' Hans Arp, c. 1942; as quoted in Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, by Herschel Browning Chipp, Peter Selz, p. 390
1910-20s

“I met Sophie Taeuber in Zurich in 1915. Even then she already knew how to give direct and palpable shape to her inner reality. In those days this kind of art was called 'abstract art'. Now it is known as 'concrete art,' for nothing is more concrete than the psychic reality it expresses. Like music this art is tangible inner reality she was already dividing the surface of a watercolor into squares and rectangles which she juxtaposed horizontally and perpendicularly. She constructed her painting like a work of masonry. The colors are luminous, going from rawest yellow to deep red or…. blue.”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 383

“Whatever became of Kurt Schwitters' novel 'Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling' [Franz Müller's Wire Spring] several chapters of which we composed together? Is it buried under the bomb ruins of his house on Waldhausenstrasse in Hannover? For hours, Schwitters and I sat together and spun dialogue, in rhapsody. He took these writings and channeled them into his novel…We sat together again, writing 'Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling':
H. A.: The nightingales have had enough of your hymnal Karagösen. Play violin on parrots, but avoid the women red hood ans snow widow.
K. Schw.: Should I pe-trify something for you? Or would you like play cry together?
H. A.: Should we wash our tears or drown them?
K. Schw.: You are a sipsnipper, Since when do your diamonds bark?
H. A.: The water is getting hard. A fruit cries out loud and gives birth to a fish.
K. Schw.: I'll p-ut it in the sea, or should I st-ab you with it?”

Arp's quote on his wife, in 'Sophie Taeuber-Arp', Hans Arp; in Arp on Arp: Poems, Essays, Memories, ed. Marcel Jean, transl. Joachim Neugroschel; Viking Press, New York 1972, p. 222
1910-20s

“Like the disposition of planes, the proportion of these planes and their colors seemed to depend only upon chance, and I declared that these works were ordered 'according to the law of chance', just like in the order of nature.”

Dialogue between Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters, (1956) with introduction in: Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling-- Memories of Kurt Schwitters; as quoted in I is Style, ed. Siegfried Gohr & Gunda Luyken, commissioned by w:Rudi Fuchs, 2000, pp. 139-140
1950s

“the streams buck like rams in a tent
whips crack and from the hills come the crookedly combed
shadows of the shepherds.
black eggs and fools' bells fall from the trees.
thunder drums and kettledrums beat upon the ears of the donkeys.
wings brush against flowers.
fountains spring up in the eyes of the wild boar.”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 307

“It was Sophie [Taeuber] who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium.”

Dada poetry lines from his poem 'Der Vogel Selbdritt', Jean / Hans Arp - first published in 1920; as quoted in Gesammelte Gedichte I (transl. Herbert Read), p. 41
1910-20s

“I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born, I have confidence in it [Arp refers to 'automatic creation of art']. I do not think about it. The forms arrive pleasant, or strange, hostile, inexplicable, mute, or drowsy. They are born from themselves. It seems to me as if all I do is move my hands.”

In 'Unsern täglichen Traum', Hans Arp (1914 - 1954); p. 76; as quoted in Arp, ed. Serge Fauchereau, Ediciones Poligrafa, S. A., Barcelona 1988, p. 11
1960s

“Actually, it was in Paris in 1914 that I did my first collages, for an occultist friend. They were mysterious portico's which were supposed to replace mural paintings and which evoked the structure of palm branches or fish-bones. [remark on the first collages Arp made, in different materials]”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 307

“I tried to be natural, in other words the exact opposite of what drawing teachers call 'faithful to nature'. I made my first experiments with free form.”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 430

“Already in 1915, Sophie Taeuber [his wife] divides the surface of her aquarelle into squares and rectangles which she then juxtaposes horizontally and perpendicularly [as Mondrian, Itten and Paul Klee did in the same period]. She constructs them as if they were masonry work. The colors are luminous, ranging from the raw yellow to deep red or blue.”

Looking, Arp, Jean; as quoted by Soby, James Thrall. Arp: The Museum of Modern Art. Doubleday, New York, 1958, Print. p. 12
1960s

“Dadaism has launched an attack on the fine arts. It has declared art to be a magic opening of the bowels, administered an enema to the Venus of Milo, and finally enabled 'Laocoon and Sons' to ease themselves after a thousand-year struggle with the rattlesnake. Dadaism has reduced positive and negative to utter nonsense. It has been destructive in order to achieve indifference.”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 288, Arp refers in this quote to the structure in the early watercolor paintings by his wife Sophie Taeuber.

“To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.”

1910-20s
Zdroj: Isms in Art, (Hans Arp and El Lissitzky, The isms of art, 1924), published in 1925

“I did exhibitions with the Surrealists [in Paris, c. 1929] because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.”

Zdroj: 1960s, Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs (1966), p. 571 - Hans Arp's quote, made in 1962 in Galerie Denise René - this remark is also the last line in the art book Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs, Hans Arp, Gallimard, Paris 1966