From the Meudon-Val-Fleury RER station, it is a fifteen-minute walk. The landscape is pleasant. The buildings are low, the houses are tidy, and there are trees almost everywhere. It is a rich and wise suburb. And then, at number 21 rue des Châtaigniers, in Clamart, we find ourselves in front of a building where the avant-garde of the early twentieth centurymy The century is in full swing.
It was in this commune in the Hauts-de-Seine that a couple of artists settled in 1929: Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The former was born in 1886, was German in occupied Alsace and became French again in 1918. She, three years younger than him, was Swiss. In Zurich, a few years earlier, they were the emblematic couple of the Dada movement where, in a nightclub in the city centre, the Cabaret Voltaire, absolute artistic freedom reigned.
The Arps are sculptors, painters, poets, designers… Sophie Taeuber-Arp imagines a three-storey block where they will live and work. There they will welcome their artist friends. The guest list is a dream, as are the photographs of glasses clinking on the lawn in the garden.
Ovoid shapes, made of interlacing and hollows.
Visual artists Max Ernst, Joan Miró, Robert and Sonia Delaunay, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia and Gabriële Buffet-Picabia, writers James Joyce, André Breton, Paul Eluard, René Char, composer Maurice Ravel… We could name dozens of forgotten masters or apprentices of artists of the time. Among them, “a young Spanish painter named Dalí”, The owner of the place will write, or the American minimalist prodigy Ellsworth Kelly, of whom certain posters from the retrospective currently dedicated to him by the Louis Vuitton Foundation show that he was a visitor to the Arp.
But the house, now an exhibition space open to the general public, was less a place of celebration than a workspace. Jean Arp, who was widowed in 1943 and remarried a friend of his wife, Marguerite Hagenbach, worked there until his death in 1966. He had imagined in particular a series of sculptures on pedestals, the Ptolemy, Inspired by the simplicity of Greek statuary. Or ovoid shapes, made of interlacing and hollows.
A soft, joyful, almost natural abstraction, which pleases Hedi Slimane, creative director of the Celine house. This great connoisseur of the avant-garde, aware of what modern art can bring to contemporary art, decided to turn Jean Arp’s work into the third part of the “Artist’s Jewels” from the luxury brand.
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