Hans Arp

Lot Description Jean (Hans) Arp (1886-1966) Sans titre with Succession stamp 'Arp SUCC. JEAN ARP' (on the reverse) charcoal and estompe on paper 11 5/8 x 8 1/8 in. (29.5 x 20.8 cm.) Provenance Estate of the artist. Acquired by the late owner, by 1997. Pre-Lot Text Property from the Collection of Mona Ackerman

Lot Description Jean (Hans) Arp (1886-1966) Evocation d'une forme humaine lunaire spectrale cast cement Height: 33 1/8 in. (84.1 cm.) Conceived in 1950 Provenance Groupe Espace, Paris. Galerie des 4 Mouvements, Paris. Acquired from the above by the present owner, September 1975. Pre-Lot Text PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE AMERICAN COLLECTION Literature C. Giedion-Welcker, Jean Arp, Stuttgart, 1957, p. 111, no. 101 (pink limestone version illustrated, p. 91; titled Human Lunar Spectral). I. Jianou, Jean Arp, Paris, 1973, p. 72, no. 101 (titled Humaine Lunaire Spectrale). A. Hartog, ed., Jean Arp, Sculptures, A Critical Survey, Ostfildern, 2012, p. 281, no. 101 (bronze version illustrated). View Lot Notes > By 1930, roughly two years after he disengaged from the surrealist movement, Arp found himself more and more preoccupied by the expanded volumes of sculpture in the round. Years later he recalled, "Suddenly my need for interpretation vanished, and the body, the form, the supremely perfected work became everything to me" (quoted in Arp, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1958, p. 14). It was from this point forward that he learned to transform the biomorphic shapes of his earlier reliefs into full-fledged sculptural forms. Finding a touchstone in the eternal process of nature, the sculpture of the second half of Arp's career plays infinite variations on this theme, instinctively recasting its elemental motifs--organic bodies, biological shapes--into integral new forms. The convex and concave undulations of the present work create seductive plays of light and shadow, evocative of a human torso and at the same time of a mysterious lunar landscape, as the title suggests. Sharing his commitment to a "truth to materials" aesthetic with Henry Moore and Constantin Brancusi, Arp sought the fullest expression of his forms through their interplay with the nature of the material. Stone was a natural material with which Arp was generally most at ease, and the medium only seems to add to its intrinsic organic quality and intimacy between artist and material present in many of Arp's stone sculptures, whether cast or carved.

LOT 231 PROPERTY FROM AN IMPORTANT PRIVATE COLLECTION JEAN ARP 1886 - 1966 COURONNE DE BOURGEONS II Inscribed Arp, numbered 5/5 and inscribed with the foundry mark E. Godard Fondeur Bronze Height: 20 3/8 in. 51.7 cm Conceived in 1936 and cast in an edition of 5. According to Marguerite Arp this work is number 5 from the edition of 5, cast by Godard in 1972.

Lot Description Jean (Hans) Arp (1886-1966) Entre lys et défense (Lily or Elephant's Tusk) white marble Height: 37 in. (94 cm.) Executed in 1958; unique Provenance Galerie Chalette (Madeleine Lejwa), New York. Vera and Albert A. List, Connecticut (January 1963); sale, Christie's, New York, 20 November 1986, lot 436. Quintana Fine Art, New York (acquired at the above sale). Nabil Abillama, Paris. Galerie JGM, Paris. Acquired from the above by the late owner. Pre-Lot Text PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF MONA ACKERMAN Dr. Mona Ackerman was a gifted clinical psychologist. She was a popular columnist for the Huffington Post. She was a renowned philanthropist. She was a celebrated hostess. She was a mother, a grandmother, a daughter, a sister, an aunt and a girlfriend. She collected art the way she did friends--choosing what she liked regardless of fashion. This collection is who she was: eclectic, tasteful and zestfully unpredictable. Mona was not a collector. She was an appreciator. She had a keen and disciplined eye, but she also had a wandering eye. If it was good, if it spoke to her, she wanted it, and she was able to meld different periods isolating what they had in common. In her home, she arranged her pieces--paintings, sculptures, etc.--so that they flowed into one another. The artists created the art. Mona created the continuity. Mona Ackerman was born in Tel Aviv, Israel and came to America as a child. She was raised in New Mexico, Ohio, Minnesota and finally New York. She studied abroad, she traveled the world. She worked in the corporate world and then as a book editor and a movie executive. Ultimately, she received her doctorate in psychology and after working at Bellevue Hospital and as a school psychologist, she opened a practice on the Upper East Side. She thrived--and so, from all accounts, did her patients--but her main job, always, was as a mother. Whatever it is that is essential to life--energy, soul, joy, exuberance and of course love--Mona Ackerman had in abundance. In whatever she did--whether it was one of her celebrated Chinese banquets for 40 or a one-on-one session in her office--she brought a special and rare joy. She embraced life and it seemed all of life embraced her in return. She is sorely missed. Literature E. Trier, Jean Arp, Sculpture: His Last Ten Years, New York, 1968, p. 107, no. 164. A. Hartog, ed., Hans Arp, Sculptures--A Critical Survey, Ostfildern, 2012, p. 309, no. 164 (bronze version illustrated, p. 130). View Lot Notes > The mysterious title Entre lys et défense which Arp invented for this sculpture describes an odd but typically characteristic commingling (for this artist) of two opposing notions, which the sculptor has visually joined in this single form: here he conjures the sensuous idea of the smooth curves and silken softness of a fragile lily, and, by abrupt contrast, the hard defensive point of an elephant's ivory tusk. Formally, Arp derived this sculpture from a smaller work of 1949 that he called Buste de lutin ("Bust of Gnome"; Giedion-Welcker, no. 92). A humorous evocation of one such appealingly grotesque little garden creature, quite unlike the kind of antithetical proposition, this visual parable, to which Arp bends our thoughts here. The tusk in the present sculpture, as well as the pointed gnomic hat in Buste de lutin, resemble a common motif of Arp's sculpture, a bluntly pointed growth, as may be found on a stalk, which for him represented a bud, a symbol of gestation, an embryonic shoot from which a flower would eventually emerge. Arp recounted a conversation he once had with Piet Mondrian, in which the latter, drawing upon the symbolist heritage of the late nineteenth century and his own purist prescription for modern art, established art and nature as opposing principles. Arp voiced his disagreement. He viewed art as a process that unites man and nature. In his work Arp "gradually turned from his early burlesque interpretations of life to the fusion of natural and human substance into a new sculptural unity. He produced anonymous forms, symbols of life, in which the tragic rifts, dividing the human, the natural, and the artificial were bridged" (C. Giedion-Welcker, Jean Arp, London, 1957, p. xxvii). The sculptor's close association with the Surrealist movement during the 1920s reinforced his organic approach to abstract form, at a time when the volumetric concerns and architectural discipline of Cubism were still the prevailing ideas in modern sculpture. In 1952 Arp wrote: "I draw things that recline, drift, rise, ripen, fall. I model fruits that lie still, clouds that drift on and up, stars that grow ripe and drop, symbols of the eternal transformation into infinite peace. They are memories of vegetative, biological shapes, colors that fade, harmonies that die out. Genesis, birth, blossoming often occur in a dreamlike state to open eyes, and it is only afterward that the rational meaning is revealed" (M. Jean, ed., "The Inner Language" in Arp: Collected French Writings, London, 1974, p. 292). The process of evolution is a key element in Arp's sculpture. He sought to achieve a transformation where human and natural elements converge and then venture forth to assume still further formal identities, mysterious, perhaps even ambiguous, but illuminating in unforeseen ways, that create a vast network of poetical visual metaphors, a universal morphology. "Often some detail in one of my sculptures, a curve or a contrast that moves me, becomes the germ of a new work," he wrote, in effect explaining the process at work as it may apply in the case of present sculpture, tracing the development of the bud form to the gnome's hat, and then finally to the lily and the elephant's tusk. "I accentuate the curve or the contrast and this leads to the birth of new forms. Among these, perhaps two of them will grow more quickly and more strongly than the others. I let these continue to grow until the original forms have become secondary and almost irrelevant... Sometimes it will take months, even years to work out a new sculpture... Each of these bodies has a definite significance, but it is only when I feel there is nothing more to change that I decide what it is, and it is only then that I give it a name" (quoted in H. Read, Arp, London, 1968, p. 87). The first edition of the catalogue of Arp's sculptures (1968) listed a single work by this title in marble, which was noted as having been destroyed. The current edition (op. cit.) acknowledges that there is the present second marble version, which Christie's New York sold 20 November 1986 as lot 436, having come for sale at that time titled Magical Amphora, from the esteemed collection of Vera and Albert A. List.

LOT 29 THE DOROTHY M. SKINNER AND JOHN S. COOK COLLECTION, SOLD TO BENEFIT THE SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES AT TUFTS UNIVERSITY JEAN ARP 1886 - 1966 DIE MENSCHEN GLEICHEN DEN FLIEGEN (ARNTZ 241) Woodcut printed in grey-blue and black, with extensive watercolor additions, 1963, on laid paper, framed sheet 324 by 232 mm 12 3/4 by 9 1/8 in