Prints and Drawings
Photo credit: Yale University Art Gallery
© Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
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Artist: Jean (Hans) Arp, French, born Germany, 1886–1966

7 Arpaden Von Hans Arp: 2 Das Meer (The Ocean)

ca. 1923

Lithograph

image: 27 × 30.8 cm (10 5/8 × 12 1/8 in.)
sheet: 44.9 × 34.9 cm (17 11/16 × 13 3/4 in.)
Gift of the Estate of Katherine S. Dreier
1953.6.137d
Jean Arp executed his lithographic suite of 7 Arpaden von Hans Arp during a visit to Kurt Schwitters’s house in 1923 and published them through Schwitters’s press as Merz 5. Like a schematic dictionary, the seven absurdly titled plates depict in radically simplified form the recurring motifs of Arp’s work from the 1920s. Mustache Hat, the first plate, is an agglomeration of basic shapes that are variously configured in the succeeding images. Ranging from elemental (Das Meer) to fanciful (Schnurruhr, a rhyming pun in German), the titles playfully compress high and low into a shared visual language.
Geography: 
Made in Germany
Status: 
By appointment, Duffy Study Room
Culture: 
German
Period: 
20th century
Classification: 
Works on Paper - Prints
Bibliography: 

Ruth L. Bohan et al., The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, ed. Jennifer Gross, exh. cat. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Art Gallery, 2006), 188, ill.

Catherine Craft et al., The Nature of Arp, exh. cat. (Dallas: Nasher Sculpture Center, 2018), no. 16.

Note: This electronic record was created from historic documentation that does not necessarily reflect the Yale University Art Gallery’s complete or current knowledge about the object. Review and updating of such records is ongoing.