The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art October 1971 [antikvár]

Three Modern Sculptures Cover and Figure 1. Forest 1917. Painted wood, 16 X 20 inches (40.7 x 50.8 cm.), 1917. Jean (Hans) Arp, French (Alsatian), 1887-1966. Contemporary Collection. 70.52 The Bulletin of The Cleveland Museum of An. Volume LVIll, Number 8. October 1971. Published monthly, except July and August, by The Cleveland Museum of Art. 11150 East Boulevard at University Circle, Cleveland, Ohio 44106. Subscription included in membership fee, otherwise $5.00 per year. Single copies, 60 cents. Copyright 1971, by The Cleveland Museum of Art. Second-class postage paid at Cleveland, Ohio. Museum photography by Nicholas Hlobeczy and John W. Cook; design by Merald E. Wrolstad. Jean Arp, Forest 1917 When Jean Arp was growing up in Strasbourg, he painted the lower part of the windows in his room blue so that what could be seen of the surrounding houses seemed to be floating in the sky. Another time he cut a hole in the wall of a wooden hut, put a picture frame around it, and "invited his father to come and admire the landscape he had created."' Such childhood events anticipated his witty creations of the years when he was a major figure in the Dada movement. Although Arp tacitly accepted Surrealism when André Breton led the split with Dadaism in the early 1920's, his later work is really independent of any program or movement and it continues the spirit of the work that he did as a Dadaist in Zurich, Cologne, and Paris from 1916 to the early twenties. During World War I, Zurich was a haven for refugees—including political revolutionaries and painters, sculptors, and poets—who were avoiding or protesting the war. A number of writers and artists, including Arp, formed the movement called Dada. The Cleveland Museum of Art recently acquired one of the rare painted wooden reliefs^ that Arp did during this period: Forest 1917 (Cover and Fig. 1).3 It was first acquired by the Surrealist poet Paul Eluard in 1922 and entered the collection of Sir Roland Penrose in 1938. Dadaism rejected traditional concepts concerning art —and culture generally—insisting that actions are more important than the objects we call "works of art." Yet Arp—along with Max Ernst, Kurt Schwitters, and a few other Dadaists—did make objects of enduring aesthetic significance. Schwitters provided a clue to the reason for this seeming paradox with his statement that "everything an artist spits is art" (implying that "real" artists cannot help making art). Arp, on the other hand, explained Dadaism : "Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. While the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds."'' In fact, however, the Dada movement was not as monolithic as this brief statement implies. The Zurich group included men and women from many countries.