Hans Arp Quotes

Quotes about:

• While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.

  Hans Arp

  Art, Distance, Gun

  "The autobiographical pact: otherness and redemption in four French avant-garde artists". Book by Cosana Maria Eram, p. 20, 2010.

  27 Copy quote

• Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

  Hans Arp

  Mother, Art, Children

  53 Copy quote

• I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born. I have confidence in it. I do not think about it.

  Hans Arp

  Thinking, Born, Process

  18 Copy quote

• Often the hands grasp more quickly than the head.

  Hans Arp

  Hands, Understanding

  23 Copy quote

• Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

  Hans Arp

  Technology, Men, Essence

  "Arp on Arp: poems, essays, memories". p. 231, 1972.

  18 Copy quote

• All things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure.

  Hans Arp

  Nature, Men, Should

  "Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs". Book by Hans Arp, Gallimard, Paris, p. 183, 1966.

  16 Copy quote

• Dada aimed to destroy the reasonable deceptions of man and recover the natural and unreasonable order.

  Hans Arp

  Men, Order, Deception

  "Abstract Art". Book by Anna Moszynska (p. 66), 1990.

  21 Copy quote

• The essence of a sculpture must enter on tip-toe, as light as animal footprints on snow.

  Hans Arp

  Animal, Essence, Light

  20 Copy quote

• Any work that is not rooted in myth and poetry or that does not partake of the depth and essence of the universe is merely a ghost.

  Hans Arp

  Essence, Depth, Doe

  15 Copy quote

• We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art.

  Hans Arp

  Art, Wish, Want

  14 Copy quote

• To be full of joy when looking at an oeuvre is not a little thing.

  Hans Arp

  Joy, Littles, Little Things

  "Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs". Book by Hans Arp, Gallimard, Paris, p. 571 (the book gathers almost all Arp's writings in prose and some important poetry), 1966.

  16 Copy quote

• Ever since my childhood, I was haunted by the search for perfection. An imperfectly cut paper literally made me ill. I would guillotine it.

  Hans Arp

  Cutting, Perfection, Childhood

  "Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs". Book by Hans Arp, Gallimard, Paris, p. 431, 1966.

  9 Copy quote

• Zurich in 1915,... While the thunder of the batteries rumbled in the distance, we pasted, we recited, we versified, we sang with all our soul. We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the madness of these times.

  Hans Arp

  Art, Distance, Zurich

  14 Copy quote

• The vertical and the horizontal are the extreme signs available to man for touching the beyond and his inwardness.

  Hans Arp

  Men, Touching, Symbols

  12 Copy quote

• DaDa is beautiful like the night, who cradles the young day in her arms.

  Hans Arp

  Beautiful, Night, Arms

  12 Copy quote

• I use very little red. I use blue, yellow, a little green, but especially... black, white and grey. There is a certain need in me for communication with human beings. Black and white is writing.

  Hans Arp

  Communication, Writing, Black And White

  20 Copy quote

• Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man's vanity to be loathsome.

  Hans Arp

  Art, Men, Vanity

  "Jours effeuillés: Poèmes, essaies, souvenirs". Book by Hans Arp, p. 315, 1966.

  13 Copy quote

• We attempted perfection; we wanted an object to be without flaw, so we cut the papers with a razor, pasted them down meticulously, but it buckled and was ruined... that is why we decided to tear prewrinkled paper, so that in the finished work of art imperfection would be an integral part, as if at birth death were built in.

  Hans Arp

  Art, Cutting, Perfection

  7 Copy quote

• It was Sophie ( Sophie Arp Tauber, woman artist and later Arp's wife) who, by the example of her work and her life, both of them bathed in clarity, showed me the right way. In her world, the high and the low, the light and the dark, the eternal and the ephemeral, are balanced in prefect equilibrium.

  Hans Arp

  Dark, Artist, Light

  7 Copy quote

• The important thing about Dada, it seems to me, is that Dadaists despised what is commonly regarded as art, but put the whole universe on the lofty throne of art.

  Hans Arp

  Art, Important, Thrones

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• Tooting, howling, screeching, booming, crashing, whistling, grinding, and trilling bolster his [mankind's] ego. His anxiety subsides. His inhuman void spreads monstrously like a gray vegetation.

  Hans Arp

  Anxiety, Ego, Noise

  11 Copy quote

• I like nature but not its substitutes... Mondrian opposed art to nature saying that art is artificial and nature is natural. I do not share this opinion... Art's origins are natural.

  Hans Arp

  Art, Nature, Opinion

  9 Copy quote

• Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages.

  Hans Arp

  Artist, Working Together, Age

  "Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture". Book by Allen Carlson, Routledge, London & New York, p. 118, "Abstract Art, Concrete Art", 2005.

  6 Copy quote

• The man who speaks and writes about art should refrain from censuring or pontificating. He will thus avoid doing anything foolish, for in the presence of primordial depth all art is but dream and nature.

  Hans Arp

  Dream, Art, Writing

  "Arp on Arp: poems, essays, memories". Book by Hans Arp, p. 327, 1958.

  6 Copy quote

• Dada was given the Venus of Milo a clyster and has allowed the Laocoön and his sons to rest awhile, after thousands of years of struggle with the good sausage Python. The philosophers are of less use to Dada than an old toothbrush, and it leaves them on the scrap heap for the great leaders of the world.

  Hans Arp

  Struggle, Son, Python

  11 Copy quote

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