Sale: 535 / Evening Sale with Collection Hermann Gerlinger, Dec. 09. 2022 in Munich Lot 35

 

35
Hans (Jean) Arp
Fronde et nombrils (Schleuder und Nabel), 1926.
Oil on cardboard, cut out
Estimate:
€ 250,000 / $ 270,000
Sold:
€ 312,500 / $ 337,500

(incl. surcharge)
Fronde et nombrils (Schleuder und Nabel). 1926.
Oil on cardboard, cut out.
Rau 100. Signed on the reverse. 62 x 49.8 cm (24.4 x 19.6 in). [JS].

• Very early cardboard relief with slit cutout, characteristic of Arp's bimorphic style.
• On the cover of the Italian catalog of the grand traveling exhibition "Hans Arp - Sophie Taeuber-Arp" (1996-1998).
• Arp's paper works and wooden reliefs with cutouts were formative for Lucio Fontana's later "Concetti sparziali" and the "Shaped Canvases" of the 1960s.
• Arp's reliefs were on display at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as early as 1936, a solo show at the MoMA in 1958, and a retrospective exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1969 followed
.

PROVENANCE: Galerie Denise René, Paris.
Fondation Arp, Clamart.
Foundation Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp e. V., Rolandseck.
Bank collection Sal. Oppenheim, Cologne (presumablly until 2020).

EXHIBITION: Hommage á Jean Arp, Galerie Denise René, Paris 1974 (not in catalog).)
Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, Hayward Gallery, London 1978, p. 207, cat. no. 9.1.
Jean Arp, Esculturas, relieves, obra sobre papel, tapices, Madrid, Museo Espanol de Arte Contemporáneo, February 25 – April 15, 1985.
Hans Arp, Foundation Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp e. V., Remagen, Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, May 25 – August 20, 1986 / Kunsthaus, Zürich, July 5 – September 7, 1986 / Kunstmuseum, Bern, October 24 – November 22, 1986
Hans Arp, Foundation Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp e. V., Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen, 1988–89 / Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal 1989.
Hans Arp. Eine Übersicht. Arbeiten aus den Jahren 1912–1965, Museum Würth, Künzelsau, September 8 – December 31, 1994.
Hans Arp - Sophie Taeuber-Arp, ex. cat. of traveling exhibition, ed. by Foundation Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Rolandseck, various locations between 1996 and 1998, cat. no. 25 (with illu. p. 95 and on the cover of the Italian edition of the catalog).

LITERATURE: 10 Jahre Sammlung Sal. Oppenheim. 1997-2007, ed. by. Sal. Oppenheim jun. & Cie. S.C.A., Luxemburg 2007, p. 415 (with illu.).

Hans Arp, whose amorphous visual language still exerts a particular fascination today, is an outstanding representative of the international avant-garde of the pre- and post-war period. Around 1915, first, still coarsely executed wooden reliefs emerged, at the same time Arp wrote simultaneous and automatic poems. He was involved with the Cologne Dada circle and the Paris Dada movement and worked with Schwitters on various publications. Arp found his characteristic shapes during a stay in Ascona in April 1917: "In Ascona I drew [.] branches, roots, grasses, stones [.]. I simplified them and united their nature in moving oval symbols of transformation and of forming a body. " (Hans Arp). Arp illustrated the constant changes in nature in reliefs, works on paper and sculptures. But it is precisely in his famous reliefs that Arp's extraordinary artistic progressiveness becomes particularly clear, as they expand the painting surface into three-dimensionality and thus already made an important contribution to the "open image" as early as in the 1920s. Arp anticipated one of the central endeavors of abstract post-war art, its ambition to delimit the image was expressed from the 1950s onward, among others, by Frank Stella‘s "Shaped Canvases" and Lucio Fontana’s "Concetti spaziali". Initially composed of roughly cut pieces of wood and cardboard, Arp's structures - as in the present early cardboard relief - became increasingly finer and with more precise lines from the mid-1920s. This bimorphic repertoire of forms soon became his artistic trademark and, by the 1950s the latest, had become an international avant-garde symbol of post-war modernism. As early as 1936, his reliefs featured in the exhibition "Cubism and Abstract Art" at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Today the collection includes almost two hundred works from all creative phases. The first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art followed in 1958, and in 1969, three years after Arp's death, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum showed a retrospective exhibition. [JS]



35
Hans (Jean) Arp
Fronde et nombrils (Schleuder und Nabel), 1926.
Oil on cardboard, cut out
Estimate:
€ 250,000 / $ 270,000
Sold:
€ 312,500 / $ 337,500

(incl. surcharge)