Jean Arp, the false avant-gardist?

05.05.2025

Studying the past to better understand the present, we came across a surprising piece of writing.
At the 27th Venice Biennale, in 1954, Jean Arp was welcomed in this way… then, in the 1960s, things would change!

“It was Jean Arp who invented the hole”

“Jean Arp, a Frenchman from Strasbourg and very German in both education and taste, is the winner of the highest Venetian award for sculpture: one and a half million lire, the Prize of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. Jean Arp is a famous ‘cannon’ of the avant-garde, and like a cannon, he is thus a great piercer or maker of holes. He may even be the original inventor of the hole in art; and it’s a pity he didn’t think to patent it, because later, from Henry Moore to Lucio Fontana, holes of every size multiplied frighteningly, and the entire Biennale seems like some kind of skimmer.
But the time will come when the holes will be plugged. In fact, in Milan, there’s already a painter who paints with nails and has declared his intention to surpass Spatialism precisely by plugging up Lucio Fontana’s holes. So, after the hole, will we see the plug at the 28th Biennale? Let’s hope so.
Jean Arp, along with Brancusi, Giacometti, and other international ‘cannons’ of sculpture, is one of those false avant-gardists responsible for the terrible confusion of ideas and the reduction of modern sculpture to sheer nothingness.”