The Cerebral and the Sensual in Equipoise
The Nature of Arp
Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Peggy Guggenheim was a millionaire heiress with taste, brains, and a wildcat persona. One of her favorite artists was Jean Arp (1886-1966), whose retrospective is on view at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. This is the 40th anniversary of Guggenheim’s death—the museum in her house opened then—and, last year, the 70th anniversary of the 1948 Venice Biennale, when Guggenheim first showed her collection in Venice to the public.
This unique place, a single collector’s vision in a spectacular spot on the Grand Canal, is marking its anniversaries in style.
Last year, the museum reimagined that 1948 show with models of how the Carlo Scarpa-designed installation looked then. Guggenheim had taken over the Greek Pavilion since there was a civil war there, distracting the Greeks. It was a revelation to people who knew she was an experimental collector but didn’t know how far into the avant-garde she’d reached. Italy had, in any respect, a crimped experience with modern art, given the retrograde fascist aesthetic. After Guggenheim toured her collection with the President of Italy, he said, “very good, Madam, but where is your collection?” Arp was there, as was Alexander Calder, Max Ernst, Joan Miro, and many other Modernist adventurers. It wasn’t your grandfather’s Tiepolo, much less his Titian.
Last year, I also saw a very good show on Osvaldo Licini, younger than Arp and an Italian painter whose work Guggenheim also adored. The Collection has consistently shown the best in contemporary Italian art. Tipping a hat to another audience was a show of Guggenheim’s American artists. She was a collector, a dealer, and a promoter. She discovered Jackson Pollock. A biographical show called “The Last Dogaressa” opens this fall.
Arp, like Peggy Guggenheim, straddled multiple worlds.
It makes sense to do the Arp retrospective. He’s one of the place’s seminal figures. Arp, like Guggenheim, straddled multiple worlds. He was born in Strasbourg, which is one of Europe’s oddest cities. Culturally, it’s French and German, and a place where things were unsettled and shifting. Politically, it went back and forth. It’s an atmosphere that promotes creativity in the curious but panic in most everyone else. Arp’s father was German and his mother French. He was a wanderer, eclectic, and a sponge. He was an original.
By the time I was sensate, Arp was a brand. He had a distinctive look and was part of the aesthetic gold standards. By the 1950s, awards mounted on his lap.
The show does something I admire. It presents him as a savant. Arp moves among languages but also among materials and movements. In the 1910s, he was working in textiles, and I wish the show had done more with this medium, since embroidery and weaving, to him, replicate the way nature stitches disparate things together. The show sensitively offers a visual evolution in the 1910s from the geometric and symmetrical to irregular, curving wood wall sculptures, polychromatic, to soft and fluid but unpredictable curves in his work in marble, bronze, and plaster.
“The Nature of Arp” has a comfort level, and it’s small sculpture. Arp was everywhere and knew everyone, which is a big challenge in a retrospective. It wisely doesn’t get trapped by movements since Arp touched so many. In that respect, he reminds me of Whistler. Arp’s big architectural sculptures, wall sculptures, or big three-dimensional works, for instance, are left to another show, probably because of the museum’s small galleries. His work for Harvard University, absent in the show, helped make Bauhaus design mainstream in America.
Arp was everywhere and knew everyone, which is a big challenge in a retrospective.
An Arp film in the show from 1963 made me miss Arp installed in abundance. There are lots of good scenes in the documentary, showing his sculptures displayed together in great numbers, rather than one, two, or three pieces in each gallery. I beIieve it was filmed in a Swiss show devoted to Arp. They’d have a mesmerizing, organic conversation, like objects moving in outer space. I’m not sure a white wall color is best for Arp, or not a uniformly, hard white color. I like didactic labels but they’re too small. There’s a font size and design that promote legibility without overwhelming small works of art.
The show and especially the book situate Arp in Dada. Both have an intelligent take on what Dada was for him. Arp isn’t programmatic, and neither is Dada. It’s more than irony, puns, anti-war feeling, and take-downs of museum culture. He explains it well. “Dada is for the senseless which is not non-sense,” he writes in 1916. “Dada is for nature and against art,” which to him means he thinks illusionistic art is phony. Art defies rationality or common sense. The union between art and nature has a governing power, though. He liked the term “concrete art,” which was the coagulation of inchoate elements. This is well said. It places Dada in the senselessness of the First World War and mankind’s hubris in placing himself as superior to nature.
Arp isn’t programmatic, and neither is Dada.
There are many powerfully attractive works on view. “Growth” from 1938 and “Milky Way Tears” from 1962 convey that pushing and pulling disparate powers perform to make solid, unified shapes in nature. They’re cool and collected but they’ve got pulse. It’s the cerebral and the sensual in equipoise. This contradiction—force versus Arp’s reserve—kept my eye on his work. I don’t know whether Arp would have approved, but I thought about the torsion and stretch of Hellenistic sculpture when I looked at “Human Lunar Spectral” from 1950. “Pre-Adamite Torso,” also from 1938, is a playful and dynamic take of evolution, its rough limestone fortifying a sassy, prehistoric strut. I don’t think any sculptor could avoid Rodin. The two are very different but have in common so much renown and so much impact on younger artists that their freshness needs rediscovery from time to time.
Arp became, as I said, a brand, recognizable and famous but also edging ever so slightly toward that most despised element of Dada, which is kitsch. Some of his late work, like “Classical Sculpture” from 1960, doesn’t have much oomph, overdetermined, I think, to cater to a market wanting an abstract nude, but not so abstract you lose your desire for her or forget you’re looking at a nude. I’m not sure how much mass production happened, or how many of Arp’s assistants had their hands in the pie.
It’s a fine anniversary show. The catalogue is great. Arp died a bit more than fifty years ago so the reappraisal is timely.
