Art: Strange Fruit

art is a fruit growing out of man like the fruit out of a plant like the child out of the mother . . . reason has cut man off from nature.

So Jean (Hans) Arp once outlined his credo. To save man from death by mechanization, Arp for over half a century has made the subconscious and irrational his ally, has turned out objects that profess to explain the metaphysics of the mustache, made eggs, string and shirt fronts serve the purpose of art. In so doing he has earned for himself a reputation as “a one-man laboratory for the discovery of new form.” This week Man—hattan’s Museum of Modern Art, celebrating its renovation after its near-disastrous fire (TIME, April 28), is giving 71-year-old Sculptor Arp a thoroughgoing retrospective show that includes 113 paste-ups, oils, string pictures, wood reliefs, and stone sculptures (see color).

Open-Eyed Dreams. Born in bilingual Strasbourg in 1887, Arp grew up at the watershed point between Germanic and French culture, has managed to make the best of both possible worlds ever since. As Hans Arp he attended the Weimar Art School, came to know Wassily Kandinsky and the proto-abstractionists of the Blue Rider school. As Jean Arp he lived in Paris, where he was a friend of Picasso, Apollinaire and Modigliani. He first made his mark in Zurich as one of the founders of the give-the-bourgeois-hell movement called Dada. So wacky did the Dadaist antics become that Arp had his application for Swiss citizenship turned down on the ground that he would shortly become a public charge in a mental institution.

In fact, says Arp, Dada was dedicated art: “My gouaches, reliefs, plastics were an attempt to teach man what he had forgotten—to dream with his eyes open.” Using a jig saw, he made inexpensive wood reliefs around such motifs as forks and mustaches (a favorite theme he has found laughable ever since he watched German soldiers primping for the Kaiser’s birthday). Discovering that the laws of chance underlie much in nature, Arp turned out a series of paste-ups produced by letting bits of paper float down upon a glue-coated board. Later he meticulously executed paper cutouts, was terribly upset when they began yellowing and spotting with age. He reacted by trying to incorporate time into his work by crumbling the paper in advance. “I realized one cannot achieve an absolute result. One must include death. One must not make a perfect line but a torn line.”

Sputnik Horrors. As his sculpture moved from the flat plane into the round, Arp found himself creating biomorphic objects that ambiguously suggested a cross between scrambled genes and objects in nature. As a practicing poet, Arp gave them titles aimed to launch the spectator on a whirl of free associations.

Arp’s strange fruit have raised a vigorous progeny. His free form can today be found in Palm Springs swimming pools, advertising layouts, book design. His use of chance effects and nonrational promptings paved the way for abstract artists’ use of below-the-threshold impulses. But of one thing he is certain: “If the human being loses contact with nature, if there are no longer any trees, it is the end of the world. Machines, Sputniks, I find them horrible, ridiculous. The human being has become presumptuous.”