Magazine: Summer 2012

Shirtfront and Necktie (2012-1) Poet and artist Arp (1886—1966) was a key member of a transnational avant-garde that‚—formed in the crucible of World War I and disillusioned with rationality, materialism, and mechanization‚—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 Paris's Galerie Pierre 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. Shirtfront and Necktie is one such relief, and it was created toward the end of Arp's association with Surrealism. An emphatic organicism characterizes Arp's reliefs from this period; their field of reference also includes objects from everyday life, especially clothes, which Arp has made strange and unfamiliar, imbuing the nonhuman with a kind of vitality. The work was also inspired by Arp's study of the Neolithic wall carvings at Locmariaquer, in Brittany. Its composition echoes one carving in particular, from a section of the ruins called the "covered bent path of the flat rocks." A photograph of and a drawing after the carving were published in Marthe and Saint-Just Péquart and Zacharie Le Rouzic's 1927 book on Locmariaquer, Corpus des signes gravés des monuments mégalithiques du Morbihan, which Arp likely read. Shirtfront and Necktie was included in the artist's 1928 exhibition at the Galerie L'Epoque in Brussels; a photograph of the installation was published in the June 15, 1928, issue of the Belgian journal Variétés. According to Marguerite Hagenbach, Arp's second wife, Shirtfront and Necktie was probably painted in Paris between 1927 and 1928, with 1928 the more likely date. It is from his "shirt-fronts" series, she says, "a theme which with the clocks, the moustaches, the navel-bottles, [and] the forks are caracteristic [sic] for his post-dada period or...surrealistic period." She continues, "Arp always says that during the real Dada- Period he was very abstract . . . and his humor was dada only in the poems and some engravings and prints . . . it was [only] in the surrealistic period that he developed in his reliefs in wood and card-board as well as in [his] collages the typical Dada humor and created a sort of Dada-Picture-Writing."