Dadaism

Born in Strasbourg, in 1887.
Painter, sculptor and poet, he was a German national although his sympathies were French. Fascinated by his contacts with modern artistic developments in Paris as early as 1904, he studied at Weimar (1905-7) and subsequently at the Academie Julian in Paris (I908). In 1909 he went to Switzerland, where he met Paul Klee. In 1912 he went to Munich, where he knew KANDINSKY and exhibited with the BLAUE REITER. and in 1913 he took part in the exhibition of EXPRESSIONISTS organized by Herwarth Walden at the first Salon d'Automne in Berlin. In 1914 he was in contact with the French avant-garde---APOLLINAIRE Max Jacob, MODIGLIANI, DELAUNAY, etc.-- in Paris. but on the outbreak of war he retired to Switzerland. In 1915, he exhibited his first abstracts at Zurich and in the following year he joined the Zurich DADA group. During his wartime years in Switzerland he collaborated with Sophie TAEUBER, whom he married in 1922, in a distinctive mode of CONSTKUCTIVIST works while at the same time developing and maturing, in cut-outs done in wood or card as well as in paintings, his uniquely personal type of abstract compositions with oviform or curvilinear shapes lying on the borderline between Constructivism and SURREALISM. He also began his experiments with automatic composition (see AUTOMATISM), With random and chance elements (see STOCHASTICISM) and with collective composition. At the end of the war he left Zurich for Cologne, where he worked with Max ERNST and Johannes Baargeld on a series of collective works which they named Fatagaga. He also made contact with the Berlin Dadaists and with SCHWITTERS. who published lithographs by him (Arpaden) in his Dadaist periodical MERZ. It was at this time also that he met LISSITZKY, with whom in 1925 he published Les Isms de L'Art, a survey of contemporary movements in art. In 1925 also he participated in the first Surrealist exhibition and became a member of the Surrealist group in Paris. He joined CERCLE ET CARRE in 1930 and in 1931 was a founder-member of the ABSTRACTION-CREATION group. During the same years he was practicing the construction of pictures with torn paper, wire and sewn threads and beginning sculpture in relief. This followed the decoration of the restaurant L'Aubette at Strasbourg. together with Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Thee van DOESBURG in Constructivist style.

During the Second World War he lived in retirement at Grasse, working with his wife, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, MACNELLI, Sonia DELAUNAY and others, and during a clandestine visit to Switzerland in 1942-3 his wife died in an accident. On the conclusion of the war he returned to Meudon, near Paris, where he had made his home in I926. and published a collection of poems La Siege de L'Air. He had several important exhibitions in New York, where in 1948 he published On my Way Poetry and Essays I912-47. and he himself visited the U.S.A. in 1949 and 1950. doing in 1950 a monumental wood relief sculpture for Harvard University. In 1953 he was commissioned to do a monumental sculpture in bronze entitled Berger de Nuage for the University City of Caracas. In 1954 he won the International Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Beinale and in 1958 he did a mural relief for the UNESCO building in Paris. He was given an important retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in New York ...

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