Jean Arp

Untitled, 1952

watercolor over collage (papiers déchirés)

While Arp used plain paper for his early torn-paper pictures, he drew from a wider variety of sources for the papiers déchirés he made in the 1950s. Playfully free-associating, he combined painted and printed paper or decoupaged card stock into expansive compositions. The paper fragments in this piece correspond to important aspects of Arp’s creative process: One can make out pieces of a poupée (doll-like form) and a print, for example, as well as scraps of the painted wrapping paper the artist used to cover the books in his library.