The informal pictorial language of Hans Arp continues to exert great fascination on its observers to this day, making him one of the central figures of the international avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century. As a response to the First World War, the Dada movement, of which he was a founding member, was established in Zurich in 1916. Through their artistic expression, they aimed to parody bourgeois ideals and conventions, aptly choosing the seemingly banal name “Dada” for their artist group. After Hans Arp met his future wife, Sophie Taeuber, in 1915 and introduced her to the Dadaist circle, they moved to Cologne in 1919, where he befriended Max Ernst and joined the Surrealist movement in Paris in 1923. The Arps took French citizenship and became key members of the artistic avant-garde until the turning point when the National Socialists came to power. After Hans Arp's works were branded as “degenerate,” the couple fled via unoccupied France to Switzerland in 1942, where Sophie Taeuber-Arp tragically died just one year later. A loss that would take Hans Arp years to recover from.
From an artistic point of view, however, this period of upheaval can be regarded as extremely fertile. Hans Arp's versatile artistic genius became apparent at an early age: he painted and sketched, created woodcuts, lithographs, reliefs, and sculptures, as well as collages and assemblages. However, Hans Arp was to achieve his greatest fame as a sculptor. Early on, he succeeded in giving his works completely new forms of expression and content. He tirelessly produced small-format sculptures and reliefs in plaster, bronze, stone, and wood, which often served as models for later large-scale sculptures. Their bold curves, smooth surfaces, and surprising alternation between emptiness and solid mass usually seem to be taken from nature. At times, the shapes appear biomorphic, at times anthropomorphic, as the poetic title “Tête sur griffes” (English: “Claw Head”) of the present work suggests. The name evokes the image of an animal with a massive head and sharp claws. But Arp's sculpture is anything but frightening: it combines gracefulness and grandeur in a clear, reduced form. Arp distills the figure to its essence and gives it an almost futuristic expression—like a being from another reality. [AW]