"Then we went down to his work room, in the horrible beautiful Merz grotto [the Merz-Haus, built by Kurt Schwitters, where broken wheels paired with matchboxes, wire lattices with brushes without bristles, rusted wheels with curious Merz cucumbers.. .How often did we p-lay in this room! Schwitters called playing, considering the sweat, working. There we glued together our paper pictures, and as I tossed away one of my glued-together works one morning, Schwitters asked, You dont like it? Can I have it? – What do you want with this failed piece of toast? Schwitters took a good look at it and said, Ill put whats on top on the bottom, Ill stick a little Merz nose in this corner and Ill sign the bottom Kurt Schwitters. And, yes indeed, this collage became a wonderful picture by Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters was a wizard, just as Hokusai was a wizard."
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.
"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."
Jean Arp"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."
Jean Arp"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."
Jean Arp"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."
Jean Arp"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:"
Jean Arp"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."
Jean Arp