Plastron et cravate (Shirtfront and Necktie),

1927

Formed in the crucible of World War I and disillusioned with rationality, materialism, and mechanization, poet and artist Jean Arp was a key member of a transnational avant-garde that broke decisively with aesthetic convention. In 1916, while living in Zurich, Arp participated in Dada-related activities at the Cabaret Voltaire. While living in Paris in the 1920s, he came under the sway of the Surrealists, and his work was included in the first group exhibition of Surrealist art at the Galerie Pierre, in Paris, in 1925. Arp was one of the first artists to embrace two of the avant-garde’s most important inventions: collage and abstraction. In 1916–17, he began to produce painted relief sculptures, using mostly wood and, slightly later, cardboard. <em>Shirtfront and Necktie</em> is one such work. Emphatically organic, it references an everyday object — clothing — which Arp has made strange and unfamiliar, imbuing the inhuman with a kind of animus. This particular assemblage was inspired by Arp’s study of the Neolithic wall carvings at Locmariaquer, in Brittany, the subject of a book published in France in 1927. Its composition echoes one carving in particular, from a section of the ruins called the "covered bent path of the flat rocks."