About Jean Arp
Arp dodged military conscription by feigning insanity at the German consulate. He crossed himself before a portrait of Hindenburg, filled every line of a form with his date of birth, drew lines underneath each entry, and calculated their sum. The authorities let him go.
He was born Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp in Strasbourg in 1886, when Alsace was German. He was neither fully French nor fully German. He used Hans in German contexts and Jean in French. After Alsace returned to France following the First World War, French law required him to legally become Jean Arp.
Jean Arp
Arp dodged military conscription by feigning insanity at the German consulate. He crossed himself before a portrait of Hindenburg, filled every line of a form with his date of birth, drew lines underneath each entry, and calculated their sum. The authorities let him go. He was born Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp in Strasbourg in 1886, when Alsace was German. He was neither fully French nor fully German. He used Hans in German contexts and Jean in French. After Alsace returned to France following the First World War, French law required him to legally become Jean Arp. He co-founded Dada at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich in 1916 with Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Tristan Tzara. His chance collages from that year were made by tearing paper into scraps, dropping them onto a sheet, and gluing them where they fell. The method was a deliberate surrender of artistic control. He married the artist Sophie Taeuber in 1922. She was arguably the more rigorous abstract artist of the two. His own work evolved into biomorphic sculpture: smooth, organic forms that look biological but represent nothing specific. They appear to have grown rather than been carved.
