Arp Quotes & Sayings

To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing. — Hans Arp

I gloomily came to the ironic conclusion that if you take a highly intelligent person and give them the best possible, elite education, then you will most likely wind up with an academic who is completely impervious to reality. — Halton Arp

Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages. — Hans Arp

The non-geometric biomorphic forms of Arp and Miro and Moore are definitely in the ascendant. The formal tradition of Gauguin, Fauvism and Expressionism will probably dominate for some time to come the tradition of Cezanne and Cubism. — Alfred H. Barr Jr.

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation ... tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation. — Jean Arp

The vertical and the horizontal are the extreme signs available to man for touching the beyond and his inwardness. — Hans Arp

His words held depth, but not enough to make her forget the desire to do something more than just leave the hospital alive. All she could think of now was the pain of running away. She'd left her family, left Prague behind out of fear. And still war had chased her to an ARP shelter in the heart of London. How could she run again? Something mattered in standing up to fight. — Kristy Cambron

While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. — Hans Arp

I like nature but not its substitutes ... Mondrian opposed art to nature saying that art is artificial and nature is natural. I do not share this opinion ... Art's origins are natural. — Hans Arp

All things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure. — Hans Arp

I use very little red. I use blue, yellow, a little green, but especially ... black, white and grey. There is a certain need in me for communication with human beings. Black and white is writing. — Hans Arp

Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order. — Hans Arp

It was Sophie ( Sophie Arp Tauber, woman artist and later Arp's wife) who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium. — Hans Arp

Picture yourself during the early 1920's inside the dome of the Mount Wilson Observatory ... Humason is showing Shapley stars he had found in the Andromeda Nebula that appeared and disappeared on photographs of that object. The famous astronomer very patiently explains that these objects could not be stars because the Nebula was a nearby gaseous cloud within our own Milky Way system. Shapley takes his handkerchief from his pocket and wipes the identifying marks off the back of the photographic plate. — Halton Arp

Any work that is not rooted in myth and poetry or that does not partake of the depth and essence of the universe is merely a ghost. — Hans Arp

The important thing about Dada, it seems to me, is that Dadaists despised what is commonly regarded as art, but put the whole universe on the lofty throne of art. — Hans Arp

In the good times of Dada, we detested polished works, the distracted air of spiritual struggle, the titans, and we rejected them with all out being. — Hans Arp

As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface..Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface. — Hans Arp

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb. — Jean Arp

Often the hands grasp more quickly than the head. — Hans Arp

Ever since my childhood, I was haunted by the search for perfection. An imperfectly cut paper literally made me ill. I would guillotine it. — Hans Arp

In 1915 Sophie Tauber and I carried out our first works in the simplest forms, using painting, embroidery and pasted paper (without using oil colors to avoid any reference with usual painting). These were probably the first manifestations of their kind, pictures that were their own reality, without meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected everything in the nature of a copy or a description, in order to give free flow to what was elemental and spontaneous. — Hans Arp

I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's. — Hans Arp

Already in 1915, Sophie Tauber divides the surface of her aquarelle into squares and rectangles which she then juxtaposes horizontally and perpendicularly as Mondrian, Itten and Paul Klee did in the same period, fh). She constructs them as if they were masonry work. The colors are luminous, ranging from the raw yellow to deep red or blue. — Hans Arp

DaDa is beautiful like the night, who cradles the young day in her arms. — Hans Arp

In recent times, Surrealist painters have used descriptive illusionistic academic methods. — Hans Arp

We attempted perfection; we wanted an object to be without flaw, so we cut the papers with a razor, pasted them down meticulously, but it buckled and was ruined ... that is why we decided to tear prewrinkled paper, so that in the finished work of art imperfection would be an integral part, as if at birth death were built in. — Hans Arp

The essence of a sculpture must enter on tip-toe, as light as animal footprints on snow. — Hans Arp

We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art. — Hans Arp

Zurich in 1915, ... While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the madness of these times. — Hans Arp

No matter how many times something has been observed, it cannot be believed until it has been observed again. — Halton Arp

After all, to get the whole universe totally wrong in the face of clear evidence for over 75 years merits monumental embarrassment and should induce a modicum of humility. — Halton Arp

The man who speaks and writes about art should refrain from censuring or pontificating. He will thus avoid doing anything foolish, for in the presence of primordial depth all art is but dream and nature. — Hans Arp

Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man's vanity to be loathsome. — Hans Arp

Of course, if one ignores contradictory observations, one can claim to have an "elegant" or "robust" theory. But it isn't science. — Halton Arp

I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born. I have confidence in it. I do not think about it. — Hans Arp

A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone ... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses. — Hans Arp

Each one of these bodies (art-works Arp made) certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name. — Hans Arp

The streams buck like rams in a tent / whips crack and from the hills come the crookedly combed /shadows of the shepherds. /black eggs and fools' bells fall from the trees. / thunder drums and kettledrums beat upon the ears of the donkeys. / wings brush against flowers. / fountains spring up in the eyes of the wild boar. — Hans Arp

He began with the core principle he had intoned at the dawn of his political career 25 years before: A democratic Calvinist in the Netherlands could not vote Democratic in the United States because that party trays its origins to Thomas Jefferson, who in turn had endorsed the principles of the French Revolution. — James Bratt