Camille Goemans, Brussels (acqui💦red froඣm the artist)

Pierre Janlet, Brussels (acquired from the above in 1928 and until at le⛄ast 1978)

Private Collection

Paris, Galerie Surréaliste, Jean Arp, 1927, no. 43

Paris, Galerie Goemans, Arp, 1929, no. 17

London, Hayward Gallery, Dada and Surrealism Reviewed, 1978, no. 9.3, illustrated in the catalogue

Bernd Rau, Hans Arp: Die Reliefs: Oeuvre Katalog, Stuttgart, 1981, no. 133, illustrated p. 70 (with the measurements 32.5 by 26 cm)

Oil and metallic paint on relief board. The board is slightly buckling in the metallic area and in the upper right quadrant. Under ultra-violet light, there is some retouching of frame abrasion along the lower horizontal framing edge and the right vertical edge towards the center, and tiny spots in the upper-left quadrant. In the central top white element, there is also a florescent hairline (about 4 cm), which seems to be due to an imperfection in the board that was painted over by the artist. Over all, this work is in very good condition. Colors: The dark circle in the upper left is a bit more aubergine than it appears in the catalogue illustration.
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This luminous relief exemplifies the spontaneity and free-form design that characterized Arp's best Dadaist creations.  It also reveals the pervasive influence of African and Oceanic ethnographic art on the most radical artists of the 1920s, and Arp's own willingness to assign anthropomorphizing titles to his otherwise indeterminate shapes.  According to Jane Hancock, "Despite Arp's advocacy of abstraction during the years of Dada activity in Zürich, he created at least a few figurative works in those years, and from them he developed a style that he used throughout the next decade.  About 165 reliefs and a modest number of prints and drawings are known from the 1920s.  They display a new iconography of figures, faces, and common household items that Arp once referred to as 'object language'" (J. Hancock, Arp (ex. cat.), London, 1986, p. 67). 

Constructed out of board in 1927, this inventive work bridges the divide between the anarchistic movement of Dadaism with the psychoanalytic agenda of Surrealism.  Whereas Dada glorified the irrational, defiant and spontaneous nature of creating works of art, Surealism took a more systematic approach to these very same concepts by associating them with principles of psychoanalysis and dream theory.  By virtue of its being included at an exhibition in 1927 at the Galerie Surréaliste, this work shows just how much these two&n𝐆bsp;avant-garde movements had in common.