Prefatory Note:
Shadowy figure in a low, modern doorway; marble white, precisely carved
biomorphic eggs; light blue and white jig-saw puzzles, cleanly painted like
fishermen’s buoys or toy boats; full of satires (“man is a pot the handles of
which fell out of his own holes”); loving “nature but not its substitute,” repre
sentation; a modern man who hates for art or the world to wear the costumes
of the past, a man who loathes the intrusion of the social world.
The “world of memory and dreams is the real world”; there Arp would
live as a private citizen, but thought of the social world arouses his rage; his
invective equalled only by that of his friend Max Ernst and of Picasso and
Wyndham Lewis among modernist artists; his words explode at the workings
of modern society, costumed fraud; he cannot bear that the “daily black joke”
exists beside the “real world”; the Dadaist in him is aroused, and he writes
true poetry, spontaneous and unforced, without desire to “be” a poet.
The emotion in his sculpture is prolonged; it is carved from hard stones;
rage never enters his plastic work. Even the torn papers in his collages “ar
ranged according to the laws of chance” which might, to the innocent, seem
angry rebellion against traditional art are serene, an effort to find a natural
order, like that of leaves fallen on the ground (an order like any other when
perceived as such, and relaxed and uninsistent). He finds correspondences for
the volumes and rhythms of the surface of the human body, quiet and living,
in bed, in the studio, and on the bank of the river, wherever it moves slowly or
rests stationary.
Imagine coming upon one of Arp’s sculptures of “stone formed by human
hand” in midst of a wood. Few artists in modern times enhance nature, perhaps
only Arp. Brancusi’s outdoor works are monumental stone tables and columns
on the scale of the elements, settings for a modern Oedipus or Lear; Alberto
Giacometti’s recent figures are pervaded with anguish, the “I” seen from dis
tance, untouched, a stranger in the world of nature and man. Arp is a true
pastoral artist (“my reliefs and sculptures fit naturally in nature”); his scale
derives from adjusting the human body to its surroundings, garden or field;
his process is slow and even as nature’s, carving that has the effect of Avater run
over human stones (“the empty spaces in the marble nests . . . were fragrant
as floAvers”). No Avonder predatory man nauseates him! His love is permanent.
The sky is August blue. Green skins dangle from the wild cherry trees. Its
hair scorched, the ground droAvses. If an Arp sculpture Avere present, it too
Avould sleep in the sun (“I Avork until enough of my life has flotved into its
Robert Motherwell, 24 August, 1948
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