"I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born, I have confidence in it [Arp refers to automatic creation of art]. I do not think about it. The forms arrive pleasant, or strange, hostile, inexplicable, mute, or drowsy. They are born from themselves. It seems to me as if all I do is move my hands."
Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp, better known as Jean Arp in English, was a German-French sculptor, painter and poet. He was known as a Dadaist and an abstract artist.
"Structures of lines, surfaces, forms, colours. They try to approach the eternal, the inexpressible above men. They are a denial of human egotism. They are the hatred of human immodesty, the hatred of images, of paintings.. Wisdom [is] the feeling for the coming reality, the mystical, the definite indefinite, the greatest definite."
"the streams buck like rams in a tent whips crack and from the hills come the crookedly combed shadows of the shepherds. black eggs and fools bells fall from the trees. thunder drums and kettledrums beat upon the ears of the donkeys. wings brush against flowers. fountains spring up in the eyes of the wild boar."
"Concretion signifies the material process of condensation, hardening, coagulating, thickening, growing together. Concretion designates the solidification of a mass. Concretion designates curdling, the curdling of the earth and the heavenly bodies. Concretion designates solidification, the mass of the stone, the plant, the animal, the man. Concretion is something that has grown. I want my work to find it."
"Automatic poetry comes straight out of the poets bowels or out of any other of his organs that has accumulated reserves.. .He crows, swears, moans, stammers, yodels, according to his mood.. .His poems are like nature; they stink, laugh, and rhyme like nature. Foolishness, or at least what men calls foolishness is as precious to him as a sublime piece of rhetoric. For in nature a broken twig is equal in beauty and importance to the clouds and the stars."
"Whatever became of Kurt Schwitters novel Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling [Franz Müllers Wire Spring] several chapters of which we composed together? Is it buried under the bomb ruins of his house on Waldhausenstrasse in Hannover? For hours, Schwitters and I sat together and spun dialogue, in rhapsody. He took these writings and channeled them into his novel...We sat together again, writing Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling:"
"We [Hans Arp and Sophie Taeuber ] painted embroidered and made collages. All these works were drawn from the simplest forms and were probably the first examples of concrete art. These works are realities pure and independent with no meaning or cerebral intention. We rejected all mimesis and description, giving free reign to the elementary and spontaneous."