20 Quotes by Hans Arp

While guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. We were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and find a new order of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell.

Soon silence will have passed into legend. Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother’s womb.

The important thing about Dada, it seems to me, is that Dadaists despised what is commonly regarded as art, but put the whole universe on the lofty throne of art.

The vertical and the horizontal are the extreme signs available to man for touching the beyond and his inwardness.

DaDa is beautiful like the night, who cradles the young day in her arms.

I allow myself to be guided by the work which is in the process of being born. I have confidence in it. I do not think about it.

Since the time of the cavemen, man has glorified himself, has made himself divine, and his monstrous vanity has caused human catastrophe. Art has collaborated in this false development. I find this concept of art which has sustained man’s vanity to be loathsome.

We do not wish to imitate nature, we do not wish to reproduce. We want to produce. We want to produce the way a plant produces its fruit, not depict. We want to produce directly, not indirectly. Since there is not a trace of abstraction in this art we call it concrete art.