Jean Arp
Dada in Zurich, Surrealism in Paris, and then fifty years of forms that look grown rather than carved.
Jean Arp — Hans Arp in German, and he used both — was born in Strasbourg in 1886, on ground that changed nationality twice in his lifetime. He was at the Cabaret Voltaire for the founding of Dada in 1916, made the torn-paper collages he described as arranged according to the laws of chance, exhibited with the Surrealists in the 1920s, and joined Abstraction-Creation in the 1930s. From about 1930 he worked mainly in three dimensions, and the biomorphic sculpture of the following decades — plaster first, then marble and bronze — is what most people picture. He died at Basel in 1966.
Bronzes are the bulk of what comes to market, and with them the questions are technical rather than aesthetic: which edition, cast in the artist's lifetime or after it, from which foundry, and with what patina. Posthumous casting continued under the estate, and a lifetime cast and a later one are not the same object commercially even where they are identical in form. The painted wood reliefs are unique and scarce. Papiers dechires, drawings and prints appear more often. The Fondation Arp holds the archive and the catalogue work.
If you own a work by Jean Arp
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.