At the Arp Foundation, an artists’ studio between enchantment and poetry

2023-07-16 09:00:04
The sculptor Jean Arp in the garden of his house in Clamart, around 1960. © KEYSTONE-FRANCE

The Arp house has to be earned. You have to climb the hill from the Meudon-Val-Fleury RER station. When you climb rue des Châtaigniers, at number 21, you don’t see it straight away. Its millstone facade, typical of pavilions in the Paris region, does not look like much. On closer inspection, the windows are not symmetrical, the roof is flat, two concrete balconies spring from the walls… This is not an ordinary house. Its architecture is inspired by the Bauhaus style as it was built at the time, without ornaments, frank, functional volumes.

This article is taken from “Special Edition Le Monde: 80 artists’ houses for the summer”, 2023. This special issue is on sale in kiosks or on the Internet by visiting the site of our shop.

You push the gate and you discover, behind the house, a bouquet of statues by Jean Arp (1886-1966) all in roundness, as well as two workshops at the end of the garden overlooked by the majestic trees of the Bois de Clamart. Looking back, we can see the house, this jewel of Art Deco architecture designed by his wife Sophie-Taeuber-Arp (1889-1943) to house their intertwined love and work. “Sophie dreamed, Sophie painted, Sophie danced”writes Jean Arp, inconsolable, in a poem composed after the accidental disappearance of his wife following a carbon dioxide poisoning caused by a defective stove, in Switzerland, in 1943. “You painted the clarity that makes the heart beat, you painted the night that tends the stars, the sweetness that makes the lips move. »

The vibrant heart of avant-gardes

In the 1950s, Jean Arp wondered about the fate of his workshops in Clamart after his death – he died in 1966. Jean Cassou, the great Hispanist then director of the National Museum of Modern Art, gave him this advice : “Above all, don’t make a museum out of it, make it something alive. » It has been done, beautifully. Here, in this charming corner of the Paris region, beats the vibrant heart of the avant-gardes of the 20th century. century.

Ptolémée I by Jean Arp, bronze, 1953. In the background, the house-workshop designed by Sophie Taeuber © Luc Boegly/Artedia / Bridgeman Images

Sophie Taeuber and Hans Arp might not have known each other. It was the First World War that brought them together in Zurich, where a wind of revolution reigned. political revolution : Lenin took refuge there and feverishly prepared, in the company of his comrades, the seizure of power in Russia in 1917. artistic revolution : refusing war, academicism and the old world at the same time, artists then unknown – Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Marcel Janco… – founded the Dada movement, which was to dynamite art and spread throughout Europe the « isms »constructivism, suprematism, expressionism.

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