ARP [antikvár]

An Alsatian poet, who wrote in both French and German, told me one day that he felt he had fallen between two stools. Jean Arp, a Stras-bourgeois by birth, is on the contrary comfortably seated in both cultures. He has published a large number of poems and essays in German and French and has been laden with honours on both sides of the Rhine. This ease and natural polyvalancy are apparent, too, in other spheres. Everyone knows, for instance, that Arp occupies a seat for life in the surrealist academy, although he is just as inseparable from the vast abstract movement, which incidentally he prefers to call concrete. He was a member of Cercle et Carré in 1929-1930, then Abstraction-Création, two groups that not only had nothing whatever in common with surrealism, but that started from an opposite point of view. Accounts of Arp's career invariably begin with dadaism in Zurich, which he helped to found in 1916. It is true that the genius of Arp, with its mixture of facetiousness and art-lessness, found a congenial atmosphere in the Cabaret Voltaire, where it could develop freely. But it should not be forgotten that before dada