Hans Arp Biography
Hans Arp, born on 16 September 1886 in Strasbourg, was a French painter, sculptor and poet, known as a Dadaist and abstract painter.
He studied at the Kunstschule in Weimar from 1905 to 1907 and in 1908 at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1909 he moved to Switzerland, where he was one of the founders of the avant-garde group “Moderner Bund” in 1911. In 1913 he participated in the "Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon" at the Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin. In 1914 he returned to Paris, where he met Max Jacob, Pablo Picasso and Guillaume Apollinaire. In 1915 he went to Zurich, where he made collages and tapestries in collaboration with his future wife Sophie Taeuber.
Arp's participation in Dadaism continued even after his move to Cologne in 1919. In 1922 he participated in the "Kongress der Konstruktivisten" in Weimar. After starting collaboration with several magazines such as "Merz", "Mécano", "De Stijl" and later "La Révolution Surréaliste", in 1925 he participated in the first exhibition of the surrealist group at the Galerie Pierre in Paris. The following year he settled in France, in Meudon.
In 1931, he joined the "Abstraction-Création" group and collaborated on the periodical "Transition".
He visited New York in 1949 for a solo exhibition at Curt Valentin's Buchholz Gallery. The following year he was commissioned to do a survey for the Harvard Graduate Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 1954 he won the International Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. In 1958, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and in 1962 the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris dedicated a major retrospective to him. Arp died in Basel on 7 June 1966.
