L'air monte
les couleurs le quittent.
La terre perd ses bourgeons blancs.
La pompe à mots ne marche plus.
Les bouquets ont cessé de rêver.

Jours effeuillés, p. 531

Although famous as an artist and sculptor, Jean Arp is not yet considered a major French poet, and this in spite of the excellent collection of his works published by Marcel Jean and titled Jours effeuillés.¹ The French poetry has never been the object of complete and in-depth analysis. Nevertheless, its importance as a contribution to the development and evolution of French poetry since the Surrealists is incontestable. Although there is a study of his German poetry,² not all of the verbal techniques for which the French poetry is most remarkable exist in German, while others characteristic of the German poetry cannot be found in the French. Yet just as there is an important relationship between the German and the French poetry, so Arp's metaphorical “bilingualism”—his visual and verbal binarism—reveals a fundamental unity of artistic creation. Some linguistic techniques used in the French poetry have deep and vital similarities with the plastic techniques. Thus Arp is indeed a privileged subject for the study of the relationship between Surrealist art and poetry: his work supplies the best example of the relationship between the arts.

In this regard it is interesting to note that Jours effeuillés includes some forty pages of illustrations in black and white—drawings, woodcuts, collages, and other graphic work by Arp, which constitute an iconography more or less obviously linked to the verbal imagery of the poems. Thus within the volume, art comments on poetry, and poetry comments on art. The constant interplay between verbal and non-verbal art has a reflection within the illustrations themselves in the often delicate relationship between black ink and white paper: often both the black and the white contours have meaning, and some present a rectangular black background against which the white line designates the image. One of the eleven paintings described by Arp in Onze peintres vus par Arp (Zurich, 1949) is his own Pflanzenringelreihen (rounds of plant rings). It is a black square on which one continuous white line, broad as a finger, waves about in serpentine rings. The text describing this painting is called Schlangenkranz (crown of serpents) in Onze peintres, and appears in French translation in Jours effeuillés (p. 319) under the title Voir reproduction. Arp described the image as a dancing figure of the poet, conjuring and exorcising the “gouffre” of the black space. The artist's activity is the happy creation of a line on the plane surface. In an early letter-poem addressed to “Monsieur Brzekowski” in answer to a question (“vous me demandez ce que je pense de la peinture de la sculpture et particulièrement du néoplasticisme et du surréalisme”), Arp commented on the significant relationship between black and white. After some rather straightforward paragraphs about Dada, Surrealism, and other artistic movements, Arp appended a somewhat mystifying reclamation of the fundamental binarism of man:

          mais finalement je trouve que l'homme … se
compose de deux cylindres carnivores dont l'un dit
blanc quand l'autre dit noir.
          agréez monsieur mes citrons empressés

Hans ARP (p. 63)

The binary opposition of black to white is an essential part of man's creative activity. But if I have devoted considerable space to discussing this relationship here, it is because it is also an image of the printed word—black ink on a white plane surface. One of the most important poems, written in 1937, is called Des taches dans le vide. In both the illustrations and the poetry, the spot or the mark, taken out of its context and placed against the naked non-signifying background, constitutes the basic element of creation.

This was a conscious endeavor on Arp's part, a refusal to imitate nature's forms the better to create them. Thus it was that he lauded what is generally known as abstract art under the name concrete art (“L'homme appelle abstrait ce qui est concret. Ce n'est pas étonnant, car ordinairement il confond le devant et le derrière” [p. 316]). “Concrete” art did not copy nature: “nous ne voulons pas copier la nature. nous ne voulons pas reproduire, nous voulons produire. nous voulons produire comme une plante qui produit un fruit et ne pas reproduire,” he says in a manifesto-like text of 1944 from On my way (Jours effeuillés, p. 324). A general characteristic of all his artistic techniques, in both verbal and plastic domains, is that of a disruption of known forms, of normal ways of combining elements: this has been called elementalism. Carola Giedion-Welcker says his elementalism “leads him to prefer essential organic forms, identical beneath their mutations, which he uses as symbols of pre-existing archetypes.”³ Arp rejected the notion of a pre-defined system of nature. In his letter-poem to “Monsieur Brzekowski” he denounced imitative art as “illusioniste, descriptif, academique” (p. 63). Christopher Middleton said he was more interested in the “primal functions of imagination than the images which enshrine them.”⁴ Rather than presenting a constructed illusion of the reality of nature, he proposed to unveil the unpredictable quality of nature, and thereby produce a new reality. In his verse, says Middleton, he “explored language as a datum of imagination, as opposed to language as a system of mediating referential signs, much as he has explored the materials of sculpture in their own and likewise non-referential terms” (p. 17).

Arp explained his attitude toward the illusionist system-makers in On my way. He blames the temerity and self-importance of those who have said “l'homme est la mesure de toute chose,” and accuses them of creating instead “la démesure” and models of insanity: “Désordre, confusion, inquiétude, non-sens, démence, mélancolie, démonomanie dominent le monde” (p. 303). Thus Arp claimed for himself and other new artists the right to refuse all past esthetic systematizations of the world, in the name of a new spirituality of elemental matter:

De plus en plus je m'éloignais de l'esthétique. Je voulais trouver un autre ordre, un autre valeur de l'homme dans la nature. Il ne devoit plus être la mesure de toute chose. … Je voulais créer de nouvelles formes.

(p. 311)

Thus by a return to the element, the spot, the mark, as basic principle of construction, Arp recreated a new referential system based only on the elements of his own work, present in both the verbal and the plastic art. One of the most frequently talked-about Surrealist techniques is essential to this re-creation: the use of chance.

Arp's use of the “law” of chance is highly personal. He claims in Unsern Täglichen Traum that his methods were similar to the automatism of the Surrealists: speaking of the poems in Wolkenpumpe, he says,

ils ont été transcrits directement, sans réflexion ni reprises. … Mais ces “pompes à nuages” ne sont pas seulement des écritures automatiques, elles préparent déjà mes papiers déchirés, dans lesquels j'ai laissé jouer librement la “réalité” et le “hasard.” En déchirant un papier ou un dessin, on y fait entrer ce qui est l'essence même de la vie et de la mort.

(Translated in Jours effeuillés, p. 437)

The activity leading to the creation of poems with an odd selection of words is considered a preparation for letting torn bits of paper fall by chance on a surface. One might say that the same artistic principle is responsible for the bringing together of the signifying elements of both forms: that is, the word in the poetry, the individual and separate pieces of paper in the papiers déchirés. Allowing chance to bring words together, said R. W. Last, creates a new synthesis.⁵ This of course is the Surrealists' purpose.

But Arp was not simply obeying the rallying-cry of the first manifesto of Surrealism. His first use of the so-called law of chance was in 1915 with Sophie Taeuber:

En 1915, Sophie Taeuber et moi, nous avons réalisé les premiéres oeuvres tirées des formes les plus simples. … Ce sont probablement les toutes premières manifestations de cet art. Ces tableaux sont des Réalités en soi, sans signification ni intention cérébrale. Nous rejetions tout ce qui était copie ou description pour laisser l'Elémentaire et le Spotané réagir en pleine liberté. Comme la disposition des plans, les proportions de ces plans et leurs couleurs ne semblaient dépendre que du hasard, je déclarais que ces oeuvres étaient ordonnées “selon la loi du hasard” tel que dans l'ordre de la nature, le hasard n'étant pour moi qu'une partie restreinte d'une raison d'être insaisissable, d'un ordre inaccessible dans leur ensemble.

(pp. 306-7)

This important text reveals that the appeal of automatism is subjected to the stance against descriptive, reproductive, illusionist art, of which Arp has said “Je trouve écoeurant [sic] cette conception d'art qui a soutenu la vanité de l'homme” (p. 315). Chance is the technique that allows the spontaneous play of the elements.

In the poetry the use of chance is similar: it consists essentially of the metaphoric substitution within a sentence of a word (the basic element) which does not have referential meaning in the context of the sentence. The context, however, remains strictly regular; the syntax is always normal and usually in the affirmative order, without many subordinate clauses other than prepositional phrases. Within this known structure of heavy-handed regularity, which can be likened to the frame in the collages and reliefs, the metaphoric substitution of a strange word usually results in a disruption of nature as it is normally seen. For example, in the line “le squelette de la lumière vide les fruits” (p. 67), light cannot have a skeleton, cannot “empty” fruits, etc. Because of the affirmative nature of the sentence, one would expect the statement of a situation not impossible in nature. But the substitution of several strange words (can the skeleton of anything empty fruit?) causes the disruption. The sentence might have read, for instance, “la clarté de la lumière illumine les fruits”—but that would be reducing it to a mere prose line, and refusing the Surrealist nature of the verse. Precisely, the effect of strangeness is caused by the inappropriateness of the prepositional phrase (“le squelette de l'animal” would have been acceptable, or “la clarté de la lumière”); the inappropriateness of the verb for the subject (“le squelette porte,” or “l'homme vide”); and the inappropriateness of the direct object with the verb (“vide la corbeille” or “mange les fruits”). Although this demonstration of the paradigmatic substitution of a strange word in the logically ordered sentence may seem obvious, it is the most basic of techniques and the single most characteristic aspect of the poetry of Jean Arp. It is at the foundation of the configuration technique, the use of faulted logic and the four techniques of animation or concretization I have described elsewhere.⁶

The role of the “law” of chance in this metaphoric substitution is to obviate the need for a referential or semantic context for the choice of the word. This is not to say that semantic content is always absent: one might say for instance that “le squelette de la lumière” implies that light is solid like a human body, which is not impossible in a poetic vision of the world. But this is an after-the-fact demonstration of the logical link between the two nouns; it is the stuff of literary analysis, of which examples abound in journals and books, and of which a pertinent example is Roger Isaacs' attempt to explain thematically the images of Arp's poetry.⁷ But it is important to maintain that there is no logical referential or semantic determinant for the choice of each word in this example.

Yet the choice of word in the metaphoric substitution is not entirely a product of chance. There is a determinant for the word, and that is a referential world created entirely by the verbal and plastic works of Jean Arp himself, a world which supplies a definite and limited vocabulary. And this “dictionary” from which words are chosen is not in the slightest the word of chance. It is the most fundamentally motivated aspect of Arp's poetic language, the unconscious source of the creative force, which the reader perceives through the repetitions, or leitmotif. This esthetic “dictionary” is readily definable, quantitatively, by means of a simple count or lexicon, or by the establishment of a concordance. In sum, one can accept the use of chance only if one subjects it to a pre-existing esthetic direction or prejudice.⁸ Indeed, order is highly valued by Arp: “Je suis convaincu,” he said, “qu'un retour à un ordre essentiel, à une harmonie est indispensable pour sauver le monde du chaos infini” (p. 328). That chance is preceded by order is clear also in this remark made by Arp in an interview with Pierre Schneider called Arp speaks for the laws of chance: “Chance (Zufall) for me is not disorder. It is something that ‘falls to’ me (zu-fallen). Something that is sent to me, that is ‘owed’ me.”⁹ The precedence of order over chance is essential for a comprehension of the elementalism of Arp. The word unit, although not determined by the syntactic, semantic, or referential context, is motivated by a deeper order, a fundamental, unconscious, creative force whose surface reflection is the “dictionary” or words and motifs.

The limited vocabulary is most apparent in the configuration poems, and in plastic terms in the collages and reliefs. Configuration

employs a limited vocabulary of words rich in evocative power and combined according to chance but recurring with a definite sense of pattern. It is highly visual in nature, the changing positions of the words on the page evoking a ritual—though arbitrary—order that could be compared to a dance. … In Jakobsonian terms, the technique of configuration systematically employs paradigmatic substitutions in a syntactic model.¹⁰

This most important technique reveals a philosophy of words, of forms: a belief in the inherent richness of words, the units of meaning employed for paradigmatic substitution. It is a philosophy extended to the level of the sentence as well: repeatedly, Arp quoted himself, or rewrote poems with whole lines retained intact, so that sentences move about from poem to poem like the words in the configurations. In fact, it is possible to envision the entire opus as a kind of constellation of configurations; the totality of the work is a giant configuration, in which the individual poems constitute the elements, like the word units in a single poem. Thus the unity of the work so strongly felt when one reads chronologically (as Jours effeuillés is quite consciously arranged) can be understood.

In the collages and reliefs, especially the latter, which are more typical of Arp's plastic work, the same principle operates: the unit, a form or shape, is repeated with modifications within the rectangular frame, apparently arranged according to chance. In fact, the collage can be considered a general term for a whole principle of creation, the use of disparate objects arranged out of context within a known structure. An interesting set of three reliefs called Three Constellations of Same Forms (1942)¹¹ shows the same nine objects arranged in different configurations in three separate square frames.

That the same principle of creation is at work in both plastic and verbal domains was obviously apparent to Arp himself. An interesting “poem” from 1962 called “Préface-Collage, ou menu déchiré en velle vue,” equates a literary form with an artistic one. I shall quote it in full:

Que va-t-on faire de ces perruques en plomb
de ces barbes en plomb?
Le fin gourmet revient toujours
au Grill-Room …
Que va-t-on faire de ces nuages cartilagineux
de ces clés d'air
qui n'ouvrent ni haut ni bas?
Monsieur Hugnet se fera un plaisir
de vous préparer ses spécialités culinaires:
un soufflé plain d'aiguilles
bordé de larmes
de masses de filaments ténus déliés
de consonnes fines explosives articulées.
Sur la terasse magnifiquement située
avec son panorama sur les Alpes
et ces pianos-forts des halles
quel délassement
Monsieur Vasistas
se fera un plaisir
de vous y faire servir
votre petit déjeuner.
Monsieur Georges veillera
à ce que vous en gardiez
un impérissable souvenir
Où sommes-nous?
Chez les énormes moustaches incandescentes?
Sommes-nous dans un établissement bien recommandé?
Nous sommes à la Galerie de Marignan
où Monsieur Hugnet saura vous conseiller.

(pp. 543-44)

The poem was apparently written at the restaurant of the Hotel Bellevue at Berne in January 1962, by Arp and his second wife, Marguerite, according to Marcel Jean. The subtitle tells the method of creation: phrases from a menu, easily identified, are placed on the page with other words added by Arp and his wife. The bits of menu, like the pieces of torn paper or drawings in the papiers déchirés, are arranged according to that order and precision of the “law” of chance, but they are here doubly significant as units of construction in that they also contain the words that appear in the poem. Thus while the poem is indeed a collage of disparate elements taken out of context, it also abides by the procedures of the configuration—the paradigmatic substitution.

Thus a unity of creative technique and inspiration is evident in both plastic and verbal domains. Indeed we are asked to go beyond the definitions of “art” and “poetry” toward a synthetic view of Arp's creation in which the elements of creation, the signifying units, are re-formed into a new vision of the world. Although the techniques are the motor of that creation, we must look at the world so created, at its imagery.

In Arp's verbal iconography, four processes account for most of the organic imagery. These are the concretization of the abstract, the materialization of the ineffable, the animation of the inanimate, and the transformation of mineral to vegetable and of vegetable to animal. One example can be considered representative:

Le lendemain grimpe sur les épaules de la veille tandis que le surlendemain se perche sur les siennes, et ainsi de suite jusqu'à ce qu'un beau jour vienne buter contre le plafond noir.

Les hommes qui vivent dans cette pyramide de jours ne s'y sentent pas, mais pas du tout à leur aise. Ils n'en mènent pas large et se disent: pourvu qu'elle ne tombe pas.

Tous ces jours ont en main un petit carnet et un crayon et dessinent tour le même bloc de pierre. Ce bloc rêve, suspendu en l'air, immobile. Il est là, immobile, entre chien et loup, et engendre tout seul des fantômes.

(p. 439)

The living and breathing days in this poem create an imagery in which the central quality is its organic nature. Virtually every poem by Arp has this animated, organic quality.

A similar organicity can be found in the plastic arts. One of the most dominant motifs is that of the nombril—the enclosed circular space. It is a biological space par excellence, having many manifestations in the body (eyes, ears, mouth, other orifices, the egg, the head), in addition to the umbilicus, which is primary because of its centrality and its link with creation. One would also be justified in seeing a metonymical displacement of a more sexual image. That it was the central bodily image of his work is briefly stated by Arp himself: “Finalement je simplifiais ces formes et unissais leur essence dans des ovales mouvants, symboles de la métamorphose et du devenir des corps” (p. 357). The nombril has a variation in the ring, found in many of the drawings and collages. For instance, an illustration of Tristan Tzara's “cinéma calendrier du coeur abstrait,”¹² a woodcut in black on white, has two dominant rings, oval in shape, each containing within it a smaller solid black oval, roughly corresponding to the form of the ring outside. Thus are constituted two further rings, in white, in the spaces between the outer rings and the inner ovals. The white rings can be considered just as significant as the black. The cover of the Dada Anthology (number 4/5 of Dada, from 1919) is another woodcut by Arp with a large outer ring, with many protrusions and finger-like projections, containing within it two smaller rings, also having many protrusions.¹³ Here the white spaces inside the smaller two rings are relatively smooth ovals, the nombrils. The rings themselves, by their irregular, bumpy shape, constitute a second major motif in the plastic as well as in the verbal art, the racine. The finger-like projections wave about like the roots of a plant liberated from the soil. One of Arp's early French poems, “L'air est une racine” (1933), is illustrated by a drawing of the same name consisting of many small, closed lines having very irregular contours, placed close together and in some cases touching each other (Jours effeuillés, p. 102). They loosely resemble thick roots, with their curving finger-like shapes. Within some of the roots there are some small circles, like eyes, and at the tips of others there are shapes which look like fingernails. The next to the last line of the poem explains how the fingernails happen to be present on the roots: “quand les pierres se grattent des ongles poussent aux racines. bravo. bravo” (p. 103). A second drawing illustrating the same poem (p. 450), is called Main-pied and consists of a much simplified enclosed shape having six projections only, three on each side. Three of the racines, which here more explicitly resemble fingers, have fingernails on the ends. Actually, most of the poem “l'air est une racine” concerns rocks:

les pierres sont remplies d'entrailles. bravo. bravo.
          les pierres sont remplies d'air.
les pierres sont des branches d'eaux.

(p. 103)

La pierre is another of the natural elements which Arp treated as a living thing, and about which he said a rock formed by his hand seems to be a part of nature (“Mes reliefs et mes sculptures s'intègrent naturellement à la nature. Mais quand on y regarde de plus près, on s'aperçoit qu'ils sont formés par une main humaine, c'est pourquoi j'ai donné ce titre: pierre formée par une main humaine, à plusieurs d'entre eux.” [p. 322]). The production of these natural motifs is what Arp called for in his manifesto on concrete art.

The names given to most of the motifs are organic objects as well. They include the mustache, the leaf, the egg, star, head (with or without eyes, and frequently accompanied by two side projections that look like rabbit ears), and especially the torso. In particular the sculpture, whether cast in bronze or sculpted directly in plaster or stone, repeatedly reproduces the torso, in many variations. The sculptures are almost all smooth curved lines, as if the forms had grown naturally. Marcel Jean comically described Arp's studio house in Meudon, saying it

soon became peopled in the strangest fashion. [Everywhere] the Concretions displayed their immaculately white bodies like naked witches. … There was an almost alarming atmosphere of swarming creatures in the studio; on the floor, tiny sculptures pressed closely against each other; others, already adolescent, were standing in rows on the shelves.¹⁴

A particularly fascinating figure is called “Configuration angoissante” (1955, sculpted directly in limestone), and is a prime example of Arp's use of the curved line.¹⁵ From one side, the sculpture looks vaguely like an animal—dog or cat—there are two prominent feet and a head. The “head,” however, is enormous, compared to the body—it is hydrocephalic, and the top of it seems to curve down onto the back, leaving two holes which might be taken for eyes. The “back” itself, seen from another view, is curved like the shape of the embryonic spine, with the enormous head at the top. The total effect is indeed frightening, like a sick child, or a contorted dog, or, worse, a non-viable embryo.

The essence of this and the great majority of Arp's sculptures is the curved line, bending around to make a complete circle, with positive and negative spaces. Seuphor described the curved line as the basic discovery of Arp's art, and compares it to Mondrian's discovery of the right angle. Seuphor says the curve represents an appropriation of nature, of the “bonheur d'être.”¹⁶ Where Mondrian used the square and the “marche droite à l'horizon,” Arp used the circle and the supple, dancing line; where Mondrian denied nature, Arp integrates it; Mondrian is the prophet, Arp the poet. The circle is the essence of the animated, organic shape, and the organic imagery of the positive and negative spaces—the holes and the bumps—is the single dominant feature of the sculpture.

Thus it is apparent that the same treatment of nature informs both the plastic and the verbal art, as revealed in the dominant imagery of both poems and sculpture. One might be tempted to ask which came first: is the animation of the poetry an attempt to recreate or imitate the curved line of the sculpture, or is the sculpture to be seen as an illustration of the organic world of the poetry? In answering this question, great caution must be used. Is it possible to speak of the anteriority of one inspiration over the other, given the contemporaneity of both verbal and plastic activities? It is remarkable how easily one can describe the plastic art in verbal terms. Jean Cathelian said “Shirtfronts, Forks, and many other objects are made unreal and reduced to their simplest expression … like a word judiciously substituted for another is controlled paraphasia.”¹⁷ Paraphasia is a type of aphasia in which the patient speaks volubly but misuses words—para meaning, generally, beyond, beside, amiss, and, in the medical sense, faulty, irregular, or disordered. I find the term quite rich in possibilities to describe not only the sculpture or the reliefs, but the process of poetic construction called the configuration technique. Thus the reliefs are described as if they were a linguistic art. In a short volume on Arp's sculpture, Seuphor spoke of a plastic “alphabet” whose letters are “nombril, moustache, chapeau de gendarme, planche à oeuf, virgule, etc.,”¹⁸ demonstrating, through the use of the verbal metaphor to describe the plastic art, the immediate perception of the unity and coherence of Arp's creative endeavor. Seuphor also used the language of reading to describe the attitude of the viewer of Arp's plastic art: “lire les oeuvres d'art abstraits,” “le langage de ses formes,” “qui parlent.”¹⁹ Arp himself said of his collages, “c'est de la poésie faite avec les moyens plastiques” (p. 433). And Arp described his use of colors, limited more and more frequently to black and white, with shades of gray, as a plastic imitation of writing: “Je me sers … surtout … du noir, du blanc, du gris. Il y a en moi un certain besoin de communication avec l'être humain. Le noir et blanc, c'est de l'écriture” (p. 432).

Does the plastic art then attempt to reproduce the communicative function of the poetry? So Arp apparently believed. In his poetic descriptions of the art of his friends, which constitute a significant proportion of Jours effeuillés, he sometimes uses a grammatical metaphor, as in “Remue-Ménage,” about the artist Mortensen:

Mortensen a bien démoli
les uniformes couverts de cicatrices,
les cé-cédillistes, les h-aspirateurs, les trémas-trémolos
des Beaux-Arts.

(p. 493)

The objects in Mortensen's paintings “déclinent: j'hirondelle tu hirondelles il hirondelle.” A telling statement made by Arp to Marcel Jean shows his preference for the verbal: “If the impossible happened and I had to make the choice between the plastic arts and the written poetry, if I had to abandon either sculpture or poems, I should choose to write poems.”²⁰

An explanation of the problematic relationship between plastic and verbal art was attempted by the anonymous reviewer of Jours effeuillés for the Times Literary Supplement:

In a sense, therefore, the poetry of Arp records the preliminary procedures which are necessary for the realization of Concrete form. It does not display the autonomous perfection of the plastic work, but reveals the stages by which particular images are drawn out of the unconscious and organized according to their formal characteristics.²¹

I do not agree with the implied de-valorization of the poetry contained in this statement, which describes the poetry as the early stages of the creation of images out of the unconscious. But I do agree with the notion of a verbal basis or foundation for the plastic figures, as Arp's own comments amply bear out. In any case, what is most evident in statements such as this reviewer's is the ultimate unity of the plastic and verbal creation.

Nowhere as well as in Arp's work can one grasp the very essence of artistic creation; the unique combination of plastic and verbal art in his life work provides vital insight into the creative activity of mankind. The unity of the product of this creative activity shows that there is a point of common origin for both plastic and verbal creation, which is “translated” into two kinds of forms, having a necessary link between them. Concrete art is one metaphor for this creative activity, and poetic language is another. And the tenor of the metaphor is communication, from one man to humankind. Arp and other artists perceived the importance of this metaphor of communication, and their surrealist work has its natural following in the creation of that form of poetry known as concrete poetry, which uses words as the elements of a visual array, a picture or collage of letter-painting. Arp's “pompe à mots” produced verbal concretions that endowed his plastic art with a communicative dimension and revealed the ultimate function of all art, that of communication.

Notes

1. Jean Arp, Jours effeuillés, poèmes, essais, souvenirs 1920-1965 (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). All further references to Arp's poetry will be given in the text by page number.

2. Reinhard Döhl, Das literarische Werk Hans Arps. 1903-1930 (Stuttgart, 1967).

3. Carola Giedion-Welcker, Contemporary Sculpture: An Evolution in Volume and Space (New York: G. Wittenborn, 1955), p. xv.

4. Christopher Middleton, “Hans Arp: Sculptor and Poet,” Letras, 10 (1959), 16.

5. R. W. Last, Hans Arp: The Poet of Dadism (Chester Springs, Pa.: Dufour Editions, 1969), p. 33.

6. Armine Kotin, “Language Techniques in Jean Arp's French Poetry,” Papers on Language and Literature, 10 (1974), 159-74.

7. Roger Isaacs, “Jean Arp. Une étude des rapports qui existent entre sa poésie et son art visuel,” Diss., U. of California, Irvine, 1970.

8. Isaacs (see note 7) came to a similar conclusion, pp. 89ff.

9. Quoted in Isaacs, “Jean Arp,” p. 62. Marcel Jean found an apt expression when he spoke of the “marriage” of chance and precision, although I would modify his metaphor by saying that the relationship is more paternalistic than egalitarian (it is an old-fashioned marriage, with the dominance of one partner—precision—over the other). See Jean's preface, Jours effeuillés, p. 19.

10. Kotin, p. 164.

11. The three reliefs are reproduced in The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Arp, ed. James Thrall Soby (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), pp. 76-77.

12. Reproduced in Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets (New York: Wittenborn, Schultz, 1951), p. 375.

13. Reproduced in Motherwell, p. 133.

14. Marcel Jean, The History of Surrealist Painting, trans. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Grove Press, 1960), pp. 193, 195.

15. Two different photographs of this sculpture can be found in Michel Seuphor, Arp (New York: Universe Books, 1961), item no. 12, and in Jean Cathelin, Jean Arp, trans. Enid York (New York: Grove Press, 1959), p. 39.

16. Michel Seuphor, Le Style et le Cri (Paris: Seuil, 1965), p. 164.

17. Cathelin, Jean Arp, p. 53.

18. Michel Seuphor, Arp, Sculptures (Paris: Hazen, 1964), p. 8.

19. Seuphor, Le Style et le Cri, p. 132. My italics.

20. Quoted by Last, Hans Arp, p. 65. Last does not give his source.

21. “Defenestrated Concrete,” Times Literary Supplement, April 27, 1967, p. 358.