Jean Arp, Growth

Each member of the Education and Outreach team toured the Art Institute prior to the opening and selected artworks that they felt pertained to the themes present in the show Terra/Form: Cultivating a Community.

My talk as a member of the team was based on Arp’s Growth and how it relates to our own exhibition Terra/Form within Clutch Gallery by creating gestures that encourage humans to reconnect with the earth.

The following was an informal talk I gave in the Art Institute of Chicago galleries on Jean (Hans) Arp’s Growth in conjunction with the opening of Terra/Form: Cultivating a Community:

Jean or Hans Arp (Jean for when he spoke French and Hans in German) was a Surrealist artist and major contributor to the Dada movement. In the early 1930s, he started a new direction in his art-making---that of rounded, curved sculpture.

Arp took a leading role in developing what has become known as biomorphic or organic abstraction. Biomorphism was an art movement that implemented design elements that used models of the naturally occurring patterns and shapes of the earth.

These new sculptural pieces represented a change in his work as well, emphasizing nature as a model and inspiration.

Growth represents a transition for Western sculpture. Before, the human figure was the medium’s primary subject. Growth’s reference to nature and landscape was a breaking from this tradition.

In the past, Western sculpture had been focused on separating and categorizing man from animal, animal from man. Arp was concerned with creating a space to let go of this way of looking at not only art, but of the world. He was interested in human self-image in terms of narcissism and challenging this in his work.

He writes, “Reason tells man that he is above nature, that he is the measure of all things. Thus man thinks he can create against the laws of nature and he creates monsters instead. Through reason man has become a tragic and ugly personage...Reason has separated man from nature.”

Arp advocated for a new kind of art that would restore man to his proper place within the natural order.

Growth is divided into three curved shapes or appendages. Two of the appendages resemble legs that are cut at the thigh. The sculpture becomes a slim trunk that bends outward like knees or elbows and then into bud or breast like shape. Growth combines the human form, here of a female body with that of plant imagery. This appearance gives the sculpture movement. Growth can be seen as a combination of a human form with those of a tree or plant. The upward growth of a tree and the curves of a bud or fruit.

The experience of giving a brief talk on an artwork in the Art Institute of Chicago was an exciting and fruitful (no pun intended) experience. I am grateful to have worked alongside many talented individuals to help form this exhibition and am hopeful for the community it forms.

Adapted for the talk from: A New Unity of Man and Nature: Jean Arp's "Growth" of 1938

Margherita Andreotti

Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1990), pp. 132-145+178-180