About the lot N° 246
Title : Jean (Hans) Arp (1886-1966)
Medium : polished bronze, wood and marble Provenance : Sidney Janis Gallery, New York (acquired from the artist).Bronze sculpture acquired from the above by the late owners, April 1958 and base acquired from the above by the late owners, by 1972.Literature : C. Giedion-Welcker, Jean Arp, Stuttgart, 1957, p. 110, no. 73.H. Read, Arp, London, 1968, p. 206, no. 107 (bronze: another cast illustrated, p. 96; with incorrect dimensions).E. Trier, Jean Arp Sculpture, His Last Ten Years, New York, 1968, p. 131, no. 359 (base: another from the edition illustrated, p. 130).Notes : Christies is honored to offer for sale paintings and works of art from the Collection of Robert and Jean Shoenberg. The collection, comprising Contemporary Paintings and Sculpture, Prints, Jewelry and African and Oceanic Art, will be sold over the course of the Fall and Winter 2008 seasons. Furnishings and decorations selected from the Shoenberg home will be offered in an Interiors Sale in Spring 2009.The Shoenberg Family was integral in the philanthropic and cultural life of St. Louis for the better part of the 20th century. The generous contributions of the family and the Shoenberg Foundation are evidenced in the Contemporary Collection of the St. Louis Art Museum where Robert Shoenberg served on the board for many years.Entering the Shoenberg house on Westmoreland Place in St. Louis was to step back a half century. The décor, a glamorous design created in 1950 by the New York firm of McMillen Inc., was enhanced by its owners, finely attuned art collectors, who personalized the house during the ensuing years. With their extraordinary taste and eye for the best contemporary art being created at the time, they covered the walls with outstanding paintings by Rothko, Kelly and Lichtenstein, while upstairs prints mirrored the painting collection with works by Johns, Frankenthaler, Motherwell and Barnett Newman. In addition the Tribal Art Collection, begun in the 50s, belied an interest in the world beyond the Americas. The Jewelry Collection spoke to the history of the family, recording marriages and births, holidays and the bonds between the couple. The collection as a whole represents a vanished time, a world of glamour and cultivation, but also a time of values and social responsibility, a different America.The following lots are from the Collection of Robert and Jean Shoenberg: 246, 251, 276 and 292 and lot 556 in the Impressionist and Modern Works on Paper Sale on November 7th.Property from the Collection of Robert and Jean ShoenbergBy 1930, roughly two years after he disengaged from the Surrealist group, 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. In 1930 I went back to the activity which the Germans so eloquently call hewing" (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. The 1920s had been a richly prolific decade, one in which he absorbed the intellectual precepts of first Dada and later Surrealism and Constructivism. Yet it was during the following decade that he would articulate his mature expressive range and establish the prototypes to which he would persistently return. 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."Though his works are generally shown on a pedestal of some kind," Herbert Read has observed, "from 1930 onwards Arp was working toward a conception of sculpture as a free form with its own centre of gravity and often reversible" (in The Art of Jean Arp, New York, 1968, p. 92). The horizon of possibility for sculpture understood in this way, as a dynamic body shaped by an inner, organic tension, is superbly manifested by the unifying plastic outline of the present work.While this bronze and the base were created as separate objects by the artist, the present owner ingeniously combined them together to create an organic interplay seen in many of Arp's later multi-media sculptures (fig. 1), as well as in the work of Henry Moore and Constantin Brancusi.(fig. 1) Jean (Hans) Arp, Colonne de rêve, 1958. Sold for $2,393,000, Christie's New York, 6 November 2007, lot 46. Christie's, auctioneer, New York, US
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Sale title : Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale
Sale date : 06 Nov 2008
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Sale Reference : Live Sale
