Nothing at All

Jean Arp is a sculptor who hates almost all sculpture except his own. "Especially," he once complained, "these naked men, women & children in stone or bronze . . . who untiringly dance, chase butterflies, shoot arrows, hold out apples, blow the flute, are the perfect expression of a mad world. These mad figures must no longer sully nature."

Arp's own carvings were on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery this week, across the street from Josef Albers' two shows (see above). Like Albers, Arp chose never to "sully nature" with recognizable subject matter, but there the resemblance ended. While Albers' paintings looked like a number of things, Arp's sculptures looked like nothing at all--which was just the way Arp and his tight, bright circle of admirers wanted them. Albers' work was mathematically precise; Arp's cloudy figures were elaborately pointless: in all their polished bulges, holes, twists and suave concavities there was nothing to stop the eye, the hand, or the mind.

Take Popcorn. At 61, Arp himself is as sharp as his work is bland. Born in Strasbourg, he has lived largely in Switzerland, Germany and France, was visiting Manhattan for the first time last week. A cultivated and witty talker, he seized on a bowl of popcorn to illustrate his working methods to reporters. "I begin with something like this," he explained, delicately selecting a kernel and gazing at it through tortoise-shell glasses. "I see just what expression it takes and develop that. Now this little bump here looks like a branch. Turn it around and we have a head, or a flower. But I don't want a head, a branch or a flower, so I mold it a bit"--giving the kernel a cruel squeeze--"or I may throw it away." And with an expression of critical disdain he threw it on the tablecloth.

Arp's ruddy, kindly face, under its cap of cropped grey hair, gave no hint that he was joking, and he wasn't, though in the old days he had been one of the foremost pranksters of the Dada school of art which preceded surrealism. Dada, said Arp in a recently published book of his writings (On My Way; Wittenborn, Schultz, $4.50), "gave the bourgeois a sense of confusion and distant, yet mighty rumbling, so that his bells began to buzz, his safes frowned and his honors broke out in spots."

Leave Curiosity. With his wife, the late Sophie Taeuber, Arp made cut & Daste abstractions for a while, "but the sun faded the colors. The spiders came. People sneezed and daubed at our work with dirty Angers. I was desolate, until I decided to introduce destruction into the work itself tearing it. But I went too far and then it was necessary to leave this period of curiosity and seek beauty, calm, the classic."

Few gallerygoers would find anything "classic" in Arp's latest sculptures, but hose who looked at them long enough might be willing to grant his carvings a calm, impersonal sort of beauty like that of odd-shaped pebbles on a beach. In On My Way, Arp had hit upon a deceptively simple justification for his own work and for abstract art in general. Art, said he, should be as natural as the fruits of the earth, "but whereas the fruit of a plant never resembles a balloon or a president in a cutaway suit, the artistic fruit of a man generally shows a ridiculous resemblance to the appearance of other things."

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