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Artist or Maker: Jean (Hans) Arp (1886-1966)

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Description: Constellation de quatre formes blanches et d'une noire
signed 'Arp' (on the artist's label on the reverse)
painted relief on board
22 1/4 x 28 1/4 in.
Executed circa 1931

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Provenance: Galerie Rive Gauche (M. Augustinci), Paris.
Acquired from the above by the late owners, 19 July 1952.

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Exhibited: Sculptures et Reliefs Polychromes, May-June 1952.
The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Rosen Collection, July-September 1952.
The Baltimore Museum of Art, Modern Art for Baltimore, February-March 1957.

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Published: The Selma & Israel Rosen Collection, Baltimore, 1986 (illustrated).

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Notes: PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF SELMA AND ISRAEL ROSEN

Arp, who had first begun to make wood reliefs during the First World War at the time of his collaboration with the Dada group in Zurich, was never comfortably allied with any other movement other than perhaps Dada. His unique and highly personal art, one that caused Alfred Barr to describe him as "a one-man laboratory for the discovery of new form," was one that was rooted in an elemental view of nature and, despite his close participation with these groups, belonged neither to surrealism nor to neo-plasticism. Founded on the innate principles he had laid down for himself while participating in Zurich's Dada movement, the root of Arp's prodigious creativity lay in his own sense of the hidden poetry of life and in his embracing of chance, the irreverent, and most of all, nature.

Uniquely and fiercely independent, Arp's work of this period reflected his search for forms that evoked the hidden mysteries of life and its innate poetry. Throughout the decade, Arp's plastic work was closely allied to the irreverent imagery of his poetry and his writings. Bordering on abstraction, Constellation de quatre formes blanches et d'une noire is a work that is heavily rooted in Arp's unique and whimsical sense of the poetic. Painting the wooden construction only white and black, Arp brings an analytical feel to his forms, isolating them against a monochrome background so that their formal properties are outlined and can be examined like cells under a microscope. In Arp's bizarre and impossible world the magical building blocks of nature, life and poetry seem to have been isolated. These building blocks he now makes dance by re-assembling them into what he would later describe as "constellations" of form. His guide in this process was always the intuitive voice of his unconscious and the key to his method of 'reassembly' was the 'law of chance,' a 'law' integral to Nature which he once described as the law "which embraces all laws and is unfathomable like the first cause from which all life arises, [and which also] can only be experienced through complete devotion to the unconscious." (cited in exh. cat. Arp, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p. 26).