[art] urges man to identify himself with nature. - Jean Arp

Revolted by the butchery of the 1914 World War, we in Zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. 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. We had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds.

I wanted to find another order, another value for man in nature. He should no longer be the measure of all things, nor should everything be compared with him, but, on the contrary, all things, and man as well, should be like nature, without measure. I wanted to create new appearances, to extract new forms from man. This is made clear in my objects from 1917.

A painting or sculpture not modeled on any real object is every bit as concrete and sensuous as a leaf or a stone.. ..[but] it is an incomplete art which privileges the intellect to the detriment of the senses.. .[art must be like..] fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant or a child in it's mother's womb.