122
friendship that developed between
them was only ended with Kandin
sky’s death in Paris in 1944.
Of all the products of Arp’s crea
tive activity, his engravings have
been most seriously neglected in ap
preciation. So freely do they accom
pany the text of early Dada publica
tions (his own books and those of
fellow poets), 8 so strong is the visual
structure which the engravings im
part to the book as such, transcend
ing the limits of mere typography
— that the term “illumination” is
once again adequate. These illumi
nations clearly show how profoundly
Kandinsky’s wood-engravings 9 stim
ulated Arp, and to what extent he
succeeded in transcribing them into
a language completely his own.
While Kandinsky’s early wood-en
gravings are explosive, full of the
spontaneity of flaming handwriting,
those of Arp flow endlessly, despite
their firm structural composition.
The silent and lyrical nature of Arp
stands out clearly from the dramatic
passion of Kandinsky. To the
rhythmical flow of lines Arp adds an
interplay of essential forms, a strong
proportioning of black-and-white
masses. From now on he tends more
and more towards what can perhaps
be adequately described as struc
tural growth, surely the most char
acteristic quality in Arp’s art.
Hugo Ball, his Dada days over,
turned towards religion, opposed
to a civilization’s commitment to
8. Tristan Tzara, Richard Hülsenbeck, Ben
jamin P£ret, etc.
9. In “Über das Geistige in der Kunst” (1912;
revised English translation, New York 1947),
“Klänge” (1913).
“progress,” wanting to foster instead
a world more spiritual and mystical,
as the romantic mind of Novalis had
done before him. Arp, however,
(who had moved to Paris-Meudon in
1926, where he collaborated enthu
siastically with the Surrealists for
four years) turned from irony as his
primary mode of expression to what
he calls “concretions,” bold trans
mutations of natural and of human
growth into a plastic language of
universal simplicity. While the “re
liefs” of Arp’s earliest period are in
fused with a weird atmosphere of
the incidental and fragmentary,
with the “shock” of new propor
tions, the totally plastic works that
ensued seem to belong immediately
to nature itself. Their elementary
plastic language is somehow per
meated with the primary forces of
growth, movement and change. Arp
never resorts to a mere copying of
nature; he acquired a mode of ex
pression analogous to that of nature
itself: “Art is a fruit that grows out
of man like the fruit out of a plant
or the child out of its mother. But
whereas the fruit of a plant acquires
completely independent forms and
never resembles a balloon or a presi
dent in a cutaway suit, the artistic
fruit of man generally shows a ri
diculous resemblance to the appear
ance of other things. Reason tells
man to stand above nature and to be
the measure of all things. Reason
has divorced man from nature.
“Owing to reason, man has be
come a tragic and hideous figure.
“I love nature, but never nature’s
surrogate.”