Tete Paysage 1926

Jean Arp made this painted wood relief, Tete Paysage, around the middle of the twentieth century. Arp was a founder of the Dada movement, a movement that arose in neutral Zurich during the First World War as a protest against bourgeois society and the war. Dada was skeptical of reason and logic, and prized intuition and chance. In this work, Arp developed a visual language of biomorphic abstraction to challenge traditional artistic values. The title, translating as Head Landscape, suggests that the artist is interested in blurring the boundaries between the human and the natural, between the conscious and unconscious. Works like this reflect a broader cultural shift in the interwar period, which saw new attention paid to the concept of the primitive, the irrational, and the unconscious. To further understand Arp, we can look at the exhibition histories of his work, and read his own writings on art, as well as cultural histories of the Dada movement. In doing so, we get a better sense of how this artwork challenged social norms of its time.