Constellation 1951. by Jean (Hans) Arp, 1887-1966

Jean (Hans) Arp, 1887-1966
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Constellation 1951.

Original lithograph in two colours. 1951. Signed in pencil. Numbered (5) in pencil from the edition of 200. (Note: There is also an edition of 60 impressions of an image using the same forms but different colours). Printed at the studio of Dejobert, Paris 1951. Issued by the Guilde de la Gravure, Geneva 1961.
Ref: Arntz - Arp Graphic Work no 328.

Excellent impression with fresh unfaded colours. On pale cream wove BFK Rives paper. Excellent condition. Image worked virtually to the full sheet size, as issued. Full
sheet: 22 3/8 x 15ins (570x380mm).

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The most important formative period of Arp's work was the decade following the formation of the Dada Group in Zurich in 1915. Arp was part of a circle of artists who had fled other parts of Europe to escape the First World War, and had gathered in the safety of Zurich in Switzerland. Consisting of poets and writers, as well as artists, the common aim of the group was to establish a new free approach to art which abandoned all the history of 'representation', and also all the intellectual 'isms' - from symbolism to cubism, in favour of a new totally free approach to the expression of form, or emotion, which stemmed directly from the inner being rather than from an intellectual concept.

This common aim took the form, for example, in the poetry of Tristan Tzara in a use of words which was nonsensical in itself but expressive through association, or in art in a use of form which removed objects from their context so that they could be seen in a new way, as in Duchamp's famous 'Urinal' in the Armory Dada show. For Arp it led him to a handling of form which stemmed from the very roots of the evolution of nature but at the same time was strongly emotional and sensuous in its shape. Arp expressed these ideas in the two dimensions of drawing and printmaking, and in the three dimensions of sculpture, from the 1920's on throughout his life, refining and developing his first concept into one of the most beautiful totally abstract 'pictorial languages' in early 20th century art.