Rethinking the Image

Image source: https://buffaloakg.org/artworks/k1964247h-le-cerf-deer-album-jean-arp (Accessed: 28 June 2026). © Estate of Jean Arp/Artists Rights Society, New York and VG Bild-Kunst, Germany

See also (Photos of exhibition): https://museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk/arp-the-plasters-4rr3 (Accessed: 28 June 2026).

Smooth, white, glistening, organic forms, amorphous and curvilinear. Abstract yet naturalistic, solid yet porous. These are some of Jean Arp’s plaster sculptures, produced between the 1930s and 1960s, recently acquired by Leeds Museums and Galleries, and on display here as part of Leeds Art Gallery’s ‘Summer of Sculpture’.^[1][2]

In the first part of the exhibition, a series of large plasters sit on shallow white plinths in the centre of a cavernous, high-ceilinged room. A spacious layout encourages visitors to view them from different angles, allowing their contours and recesses to make new and varied suggestions. At the far end of the room, three biomorphic figures: the slender duo of Important Person and Is, and the joyous Giant Pip, suspended in a euphoric leap.^[1]

In the second room, a number of smaller plasters are displayed alongside works on paper, books of poetry in French, and old exhibition catalogues. Here, Arp’s varied work joins that of his contemporaries – Alexander Calder’s Maquette for a Mobile (1938-39)^[3] hangs delicately from the ceiling, while Barbara Hepworth’s Single Form (1937)^[4] will be a familiar sight to the gallery’s regular visitors.

Arp has always appeared to me to be a mysterious anomaly within the modern art landscape, flitting between artistic movements and groups as adeptly as he switched between mediums. This exhibition, however, does an excellent job of mapping out his varied artistic life without compromising his very particular mystique.

Arp’s work is simple and pure, but never to the point of being vacuous. This type of art is highly refreshing to a 21st-century audience because its presence in a gallery need not be accompanied by reams of explanatory text; it exists for its own sake, and it puts us in touch with the natural and innate, without demanding to be understood.

[1] Leeds Art Gallery (no date) Arp: The Plasters. Available at: https://museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk/arp-the-plasters-4rr3 (Accessed: 28 June 2026).

[2] Leeds Art Gallery (no date) Summer of Sculpture Shows the Shape of Things to Come. Available at: https://museumsandgalleries.leeds.gov.uk/summer-of-sculpture-leeds-art-gallery-qk3t (Accessed: 28 June 2026).

[3] Art UK (no date) Maquette for a Mobile. Available at: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/maquette-for-a-mobile-295568 (Accessed: 28 June 2026).

[4] Art UK (no date) Single Form. Available at: https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/single-form-295379 (Accessed: 28 June 2026).