Jean Arp
We don’t want to copy nature. We don’t want to reproduce, we want to produce. We want to produce like a plant that produces fruit, and not reproduce. We want to produce directly and not by way of any intermediary.
Since this art does not have the slightest trace of abstraction, we name it: concrete art.
Works of Concrete art should not be signed by the artist. These paintings, sculptures -these objects- should remain anonymous in the huge studio of nature, like clouds, mountains, seas, animals, men. Yes! Men should go back to nature! Artists should work in communities as they did in the Middle Ages. in 1915 van Rees, van Rees, Freundlich, Taeuber, and myself made an attempt of that sort.
That year I wrote: ‘These works are constructed with lines, surfaces, forms and colours that try to go beyond the human and attain the infinite and the eternal. They reject our egotism … The hands of our brothers, instead of being interchangeable with our own hands, have become enemy hands. Instead of anonymity, we have renown and masterpieces; wisdom is dead … Reproduction is imitation, play acting, tightrope walking.’
The Renaissance bumptiously exalted human reason. Modern times with their science and technology have turned man into a megalomaniac. The atrocious chaos of our era is the consequence of the overrating of reason.
The evolution of traditional painting towards Concrete art, from Cézanne by way of the Cubists, has been frequently explained, and these historical explanations have merely confused the issue. All at once, ‘according to the laws of chance’, around 1914, the human mind underwent a transformation: it was confronted with an ethical problem.
Concrete art wants to transform the world. It wants to make life more bearable. It wants to save man from the most dangerous of follies: vanity. It wants to simplify the life of man. It wants to identify him with nature. Reason uproots man and makes him lead a tragic life. Concrete art is a basic art, a sane and natural art that grows the stars of peace, love and poetry in the head and in the heart. Wherever Concrete art appears, melancholy leaves, dragging along its grey suitcases full of black sighs.
Kandinsky, Sonia Delauney, Robert Delauney, Magnelli and Léger were among the first masters of Concrete art. Without having met, we were all working towards the same goal. Most of these works were not exhibited until 1920. This marked a blossoming of all the colours and the shapes in the world. These paintings, these sculptures – these objects were stripped of any conventional element whatsoever. Partisans of the new art cropped up in all countries. Concrete art influenced architecture, furniture, film-making and typography.
Aside from their exhibited works, certain works by Duchamp, Man Ray, Masson, Miró and Ernst, and a number of Surrealist objects, are also Concrete art. Devoid of any descriptive, dreamlike, literary or polemical content, these works of these artists are, it seems to me, highly important in the evolution of Concrete art, for, by allusion, they manage to introduce into that art the psychic emotion that makes it live.
by Jean Arp (1942)
