There are dark spots in the history of Harp's works. Because he made new copies of many of his sculptures from time to time with different materials, and he reconsidered a subject he loved several times over time.
(1887-1966) French sculptor, painter, and poet. Born in Strasbourg on September 16, 1887, to a family of German origin, he died in Basel. He started his art education in Strasbourg. He continued his education at the Julian Academy in Weimar, Paris, Germany. In 1909 he settled in Weggis, Switzerland. It was during this time that he met Paul Klee. In 1912, he exhibited his works in Munich with the Blaue Reiter group, which he joined through Kandinsky. The following year he participated in the My Expressionists exhibition in Berlin. He returned to Paris in 1914. He established relationships with French avant-garde artists such as Apollinaire, Modigliani, Picasso, Delaunay, and Max Jacob. After the outbreak of World War I, he moved to Zürich in 1915. He married artist Sophie Taeuber in 1922. Together with Tristan Tzara, Ball, Jance, and Hülsenbeck, he founded the group, Dada. In 1923, he worked in Hannover with the Berlin Dadaists and Kurt Schwitters in the Dadaist Merz magazine. In 1925 he participated in the first Surrealist exhibition in Paris. He became a member of the Abstraction-Creation group. In 1931-1932 he began to make a series of stone and bronze sculptures, which he called Concretions. During World War II, Magnelli settled in Grasse with Sonia Delaunay, and his wife, Sophie Taeuber. He lost his wife as a result of an accident in Switzerland in 1943. After the war, his works were exhibited in New York. He went to the USA for the first time in 1949, where he gained great fame. Retrospective exhibitions were held in New York and Paris. In 1954 he won the International Sculpture Award at the Venice Biennale.
Harp's first works were published in the Berlin journal der Sturm in 1913. These are human patterns made up of wavy lines. In his first abstract works, which he exhibited in Zurich in 1915, angular lines are dominant. He later experimented with creating anonymous artworks with Sophie Taeuber. These are usually free and almost automatically drawn patterns, based on the separation of pictorial elements and then their random rearrangement. Harp gave up on abstract lines very quickly and turned to using broken, old objects randomly found in his works, this change led him to Dadaism. After 1917, he gave importance to geometric simplicity and made collages and wooden relief series, and in 1918 he made large collages of geometric shapes with Sophie Taeuber. In 1920, he produced the same type of Fatagaga series within Dada activities. During the Abstraction-Creation period, he produced Papiers Deschires (Torn Papers) from threads and torn papers and Papiers Tordus (Crumpled Papers) in 1943.
He expressed his poetic imagination, which includes both rational and irrational aspects of nature and humans, in organic forms using a competent technique. The first three-dimensional baseless sculptures called Concretions in the Museum of Modern Art in New York are examples of this understanding. He argued that these objects were not abstractions of natural forms, but were real and concrete units. Harp has a sensitivity that seeks precision in lines and primitive simplicity in forms. Its purpose is to give natural simplicity an organic form of competence. His Dadaism is poetic and imaginative, lively and humorous. He argued that objects are not abstractions of natural forms, but real and concrete units. There are very few currents or groups that Arp, one of the extraordinary and unusual personalities of his age, did not join. On the other hand, it has acquired a unique place in the art environment and preserved its pure, childlike characteristics.
Apart from painting and sculpture, Harp is also known as a very talented and prolific poet. He wrote poems in German and French and published them in book form.
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Playful, ambiguous, sensuous — the alluring art of Jean Arp
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