Tänzerin
Jean Arp
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.