Collection: Jean Arp   1870 - 1947 

Jean (or Hans) Arp was born in Strasbourg in 1886. Though Arp was an incredibly versatile artist he considered himself first and foremost a poet, despite his success and renown as a sculptor. He exhibited his first abstract collages in Zurich in 1915, using his time there to found its respective Dada movement in 1916, and exhibited in the Berlin Dada exhibition in 1920.

It was at the start of the 1930s that Arp first began to turn towards sculpture and by 1949 was exhibiting in New York. After a commission for a mural by the UNESCO building in Paris, Arp was awarded the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale. He died in 1966 after major retrospective exhibitions at the MOMA in New York (1958) and the Musée National d’Art in Paris (1962).