Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp, also Jean Arp (1886-1966) was a French-German painter, graphic artist, sculptor, and lyricist. Arp moved in the artistic circles of the Constructivists and the Paris Surrealists, co-founding Dadaism in Zurich in 1916 as a literary and artistic movement in response to World War I and against its social conventions. He worked closely with his wife Sophie Taeuber-Arp and at times with other artists, such as the constructivist El Lissitzky, Max Ernst, and Kurt Schwitters. In 1930, he became a member of the group Cercle et Carré and a year later co-founder of the new abstract Parisian artists' group Abstraction-Création. Arp's oeuvre is characterized by the Dadaist principle of chance and, from the 1920s, by an "object language" of the everyday. Particularly characteristic is his preoccupation with "biomorphic" – natural, rounded forms that make his work unmistakable to this day.
