Hans Arp Quotes

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

Hans Arp

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

Hans Arp

#3. In recent times, Surrealist painters have used descriptive illusionistic academic methods.

Hans Arp

#4. 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

#5. Artists should work together like the artists of the Middle Ages.

Hans Arp

#6. As the thought comes to me to exorcise and transform this black with a white drawing, it has already become a surface..Now I have lost all fear, and begin to draw on the black surface.

Hans Arp

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

Hans Arp

#8. 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

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

Hans Arp

#10. 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

#11. 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

#12. Each one of these bodies (art-works Arp made) certainly signifies something, but it is only once there is nothing left for me to change that I begin to look for its meaning, that I give it a name.

Hans Arp

#13. 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

#14. A painting or sculpture not modelled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone ... but it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.

Hans Arp

#15. 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

#16. 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

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

Hans Arp

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. 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

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

Hans Arp

#22. 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

#23. Often the hands grasp more quickly than the head.

Hans Arp

#24. 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

#25. In the good times of Dada, we detested polished works, the distracted air of spiritual struggle, the titans, and we rejected them with all out being.

Hans Arp

#26. I did exhibitions with the Surrealists (in Paris, in 1929) because their attitude revolted against 'art' and their attitude toward life itself was wise, as was Dada's.

Hans Arp