Jean Arp: Poupées

by Rainer Aübner, Roland Scotti (Editor), Jean Arp (Artist)

He may have gone by two names, but Jean (Hans) Arp was an artist of magnificent consistency, articulating the same feeling for sensuous and spacious clarity across collage, relief, sculpture, painting and poetry. "Poupées" reveals another, more unlikely, dimension to which these qualities were eminently suited--that of doll-making. Produced in the 1950s and 1960s, Arp's "Poupées" were cut from pieces of paper and then stored, unaffixed to any support, in boxes and folders. Charming and evocative, they evoke his early Dada philosophy of leaving materials to their willful ephemerality. The "Poupées" tend to be single, symmetrical, biomorphic figures, cut from a range of paper and card types; as collected here in book form, they gain much by virtue of both repetition and variation, by the lovely effect of paper image reproduced on paper and by their "en-face" interspersal with a selection of poems by Arp and photographs of the artist at work with his scissors.

120 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2010

Reviews

[Ric Dragon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should I review it on the essays (they were OK, nothing terribly insightful), or the images (for me, as an artist, a profound batch of work).