Interview with George L. K. Morris

MORRIS:  What was your first contact with art?  Did you always intend
to become an artist?  Were you initially inspired by ancient art?  Did
you ever attend an academy?

ARP: I recall that as a child of eight I passionately drew in a huge
book that looked like an accounting ledger.  I used colored pencils.
No other work, no other profession ever interested me, and these
childhood games-- the exploration of unknown dream places-- already
augured my vocation of discovering the terra incognita of art.  The
figures on the cathedral of Strasbourg, my native town, probably im-
pelled me to do sculpture.  When I was about ten years old I sculpted
two tiny wooden figures, Adam and Eve, which my father subsequently
had incrusted in a chest.  When I was sixteen my parents allowed me
to leave the lycée in Strasbourg and study drawing and painting at the
School of Arts and Crafts.  I owe my first initiation into art to my
Strasbourg teachers Georges Ritleng, Haas, Daubner, and Schneider.
In 1904, despite my pleas to go to Paris, my father, feeling that I
was too young and fearing the "sirens" of the metropolis, forced me
to enter the Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar and study with Ludwig
von Hoffmann.  It was in Weimar that I first experienced French pain-
ting, thanks to the exhibit organized by Count Kessler and the eminent
architect Van de Velde.

MORRIS: Where did you first see modern paintings and what was your
reaction?  What were you doing prior to dada?

ARP: As of 1906 I worked completely isolated in Weggis, near Lucerne,
Switzerland.  I took brief trips to Paris, where I was greatly im-
pressed by the cubist paintings that I saw in Kahnweiler's little
gallery on Rue Vignon.  During one of these trips, in 1912, I became
friends with Sonia and Robert Delaunay.  All problems of art interested
me, and I did my best to get hold of every single book on modern art.
But since I didn't have the knack of assimilating the experiences of
other artists, I laboriously sought my own means of expression in my
solitude at Weggis.  It was there in 1910 or 1911 that I discovered
on my own what is now known as abstract art.  My Swiss colleagues,
however, shook their heads, they were skeptical and uneasy; and un-
fortunately, I destroyed everything I had done in that period.  A
bit later I met Kandinsky and Daniel Rossiné, and they were the first
people to understand and encourage my work.

MORRIS: What was dada?  A revolution against the art of the past, against an
attitude of art?  How did the dada movement begin?  Where did its meetings
take place?  Was dada an abstract art?

ARP: In 1914-15, at the start of World War I, I happened to be in Paris,
where I frequented the canteen run by the artist Mme. Wassilief, and it
was there that I met Max Jacob, Modigliani, Cravan, and Eggeling.  Short
of money, I went back to Switzerland and settled in Zurich.  And it was
there that the adventure of dada began.  In 1916 I met the poet Hugo Ball
and Emmy Hennings on Spiegelgasse, the birthplace of dada.  Ball intro-
duced me to Tzara and Janco.  Our little group was soon joined by Huelsen-
beck, Hans Richter, Eggeling, Glauser, Alberto Giacometti, Serner, the
dancers of the Laban school-- including Mary Wigmann, Sophie Taeuber, and
Katia Wulff-- and other painters and poets.  Seen retrospectively, our ex-
hibits, literary evenings, protests, false news accounts, and scandalous
demonstrations, which seemed like anarchy at the time, were necessary for
getting rid of outworn forms and safeguarding our spiritual life against
routine and academicism.

MORRIS: Who were your friends among the painters, and what were the forces
propelling you toward abstract art?  Didn't you begin with gouaches, collages, 
and reliefs before turning to sculpture?  When did you first start sculpting?
Had you always intended to be a sculptor?

ARP: In 1915, at the Tanner Gallery in Zurich, where I was in a group show
with the painters Adja and Otto van Rees, I met Sophie Taeuber for the first
time.  In 1916 Sophie Taeuber and I collaborated on a number of large abstract
compositions in cloth and paper.  The sculptor Fritz Huf, a native of Lucerne,
had already initiated me into the technique of plaster in Weggis.  I regret
that I destroyed a series of small sculptures that I could have done just as
well in 1930, a time when I had definitively committed myself to sculpture
but was still doing reliefs, collages, gouaches, India ink drawings, and
engravings.

MORRIS: What are your procedures when you create?  Do you start with a naturalist
form?  Do you first realize the plastic composition, or do you come upon your form
by what some people call chance?  What do you think of the contemporary school that
is all "chance"?  Do you agree with this school that composition in art is old-
fashioned and that all expression comes at the moment of creation?  Are you always
fully aware when you create?

ARP: The inexplicable, the divine, the fact that I awake, move, act, think, live,
gives birth to poetry, drawing, sculpture, writing, lines, planes, the choice of
colors, forms, flowers, stones, the choice of fragments of stones, a glance, a way
of walking, a silhouette, a human face, a cloud face.  The inexplicable, which binds
me to a sprig, a clod of earth, splotches, or flashes of lightning, decides the ex-
pression of my works.  My art is connected with dreams but it does not scorn matter.
This youthful style of painting called "the Pacific school" by certain critics and
tachisme by others strikes me as a miracle of materialism.  It is a game of
impatience which runs counter to the game of "patience" or "solitaire" that nine-
teenth-century ladies liked to play.  All manifestations of this art are beautiful
as matter is beautiful.  It is an international folklore.  I think that ultimately
everyone will be playing it.  Wasn't it the poet Lautréamont who claimed poetry as
belonging to everyone and not just to one person!

MORRIS: Do you believe that originality and personality are important in art?  Is it
the object that interests you or the medium in which you work (marble, bronze, wood)?

ARP: A work of art may be sparked off by a meeting with a human being, an animal,
a plant, a stone, an old board on which someone has drawn lines in passing.  This
"in passing" in the decisive moment, just as the decisive moment for a hunter is
the moment in which he squeezes the trigger.  For each era there is a corresponding
adequate expression.  Each era has its own question to ask mankind.  Should one
answer with one's personality or anonymously?  Both Sophie Taeuber and I were ab-
sorbed for long periods in the problem of an anonymous art.  The use of a circle
in contrast with a square and a rectangle is one of the great personal discoveries
of Sophie Taeuber.  On the other hand, the execution of her paintings, gouaches,
and drawings is so self-renouncing and devoid of fakery that her works can be car-
ried out by good craftsmen in mosaics, reliefs, mural paintings, and tapestries
without any violation of their life.

MORRIS: How long have you been writing poetry?  Is there any connection between
your poetry and your plastic forms?

ARP: The human being is a very complex bouquet.  At the very time that I was
defending anonymous and impersonal art, my poetry was venturing into the most
personal eruptions.  In the dada period most of my poems were very different
from the problems I was investigating in plastic art.  In was in the surrealist
era that my poetic writings and my plastic handwriting were at their closest.

MORRIS: Have you ever studied philosophy?  Do you need philosophy to make you
feel like working?  Does philosophy have any influence on your art?

ARP: Diehl's book of the fragments of pre-Socratic philosophy, the poems of
Rimbaud and Novalis, as well as the Gospel according to Saint John, have been
with me throughout the years.

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