Jean Arp

Arp was as much a poet as a painter and sculptor. Writing in both French and German from his youth, the artist published his first anthology in Paris as early as 1904. His poetic talent developed alongside his artistic sensibility, and for both art forms he worked out the concept of “automatism”, embodied in works such as the impulsive Automatic Drawing (1917) and the spontaneous poem The Crocodile Hairdresser and the Hyperbole of the Walking Stick. Throughout his career Arp regarded pen and brush as equal means of communication, once claiming that in his paintings “black and white correspond to writing.”

From the page of Configuration