Tänzerin

Jean Arp

JEAN ARP, 1925. OIL ON CUT AND GLUED WOOD.
JEAN ARP, 1925. OIL ON CUT AND GLUED WOOD.

An animalistic figure, at once grotesque and elegant with flowing blue hair, a sprawling bust, and strange heeled legs dances across a golden plain. After some years away from the Dada movement, of which he had been a founding member, Tänzenir is a sort of reconnection with the humour and irony that defined the group. It is playful and surreal, defying our expectations of how a dancer should be represented - the figure is not graceful in a classic sense, their body seems to escape its confines at each turn and the bright primary colors of their form add a playful, childlike energy to the movements. Arp’s wife, Sophie Tauber-Arp, was herself a great artist and also a dancer and this ethereal evocation can be understood as a representation of her modernist choreography, making this a surreal, humorousness portrait of a wife by her husband.