In 1927 Hans Arp created a relief with the simple title Plastron et cravate – Shirtfront and Necktie. Only a few planes and outlines remain of the familiar garment. The tie is still recognisable, yet it already belongs to the language of abstraction.
There is no person.
No face.
Not even a complete shirt.
Against a dark ground are several pale shapes cut from cardboard.
One suggests the front of a shirt. Another, a tie.
Enough for us to recognise them, but not enough for us to see them as ordinary clothing.
Hans – or Jean – Arp gave the work a remarkably direct title: Plastron et cravate. Shirtfront and Necktie.
Princeton University Art Museum, where the relief is held today, describes it as an instance in which Arp transformed banal objects into a stylised and abstract composition.
The tie remains an object. But it is already becoming a sign.
Dada and distrust of the familiar
In 1916 Arp was in Zurich, among those associated with the Cabaret Voltaire and the emergence of Dada.
The movement arose during the First World War from profound distrust towards a world that regarded itself as rational, ordered and civilised yet had produced industrialised warfare.
The Dadaists therefore sought more than new artistic styles. They questioned what art itself could be.
Arp was among the early artists to experiment with collage, chance, abstraction and reliefs assembled from cut forms.
This provides an illuminating context for Shirtfront and Necktie.
An object normally associated with order, dress and everyday convention enters an art that challenges expected relationships between things.
Yet Arp does not ridicule the tie.
He does something more interesting.
He reduces it to form.
How much of a tie must remain?
This may be the most intriguing question posed by the work.
How little can remain before an object ceases to be recognisable?
The tie has no silk.
No pattern.
No seam.
No method of tying.
Not even a real knot.
Only shape remains.
And yet we see it.
During these years Arp developed what Princeton describes as an “object language”: forms that were not literal illustrations but were inspired by nature and everyday life.
For the tie, this is especially revealing.
It demonstrates the strength of its silhouette.
The object can lose almost everything that makes it functional in real life and still retain its identity.
A shirt without a body
The shirt in Arp’s relief is incomplete as well.
The French title uses the word plastron – the shirtfront or chest section of a garment.
That is enough for the eye to reconstruct the rest.
We imagine the collar.
The torso.
The person.
Yet none of them is shown.
Clothing begins to represent an absent body.
The tie occupies the place where a neck should be. The shirtfront occupies the chest.
The figure has disappeared, but the arrangement of the clothing preserves its presence.
An unexpected source: a mark in prehistoric stone
At first we might assume that Arp derived the composition simply from contemporary clothing.
Research by Princeton University Art Museum reveals another source.
Arp had been studying Neolithic wall carvings at Locmariaquer in Brittany. A French publication of 1927 reproduced signs carved into the region’s megalithic monuments, and one of these ancient forms closely echoes the composition of Shirtfront and Necktie.
Two periods that seemingly have nothing in common suddenly meet.
A Neolithic sign.
And a modern necktie.
Arp is not suggesting that prehistoric people carved a tie.
What matters is something else.
The same form can be read once as an ancient engraving and again as an object of modern dress.
Meaning changes. Form remains.
From stone to tie
This is where Plastron et cravate becomes more than a witty Dada game.
Throughout his career Arp was fascinated by shapes that seemed to belong simultaneously to nature and imagination.
His reliefs may suggest a body, leaf, organ, stone or everyday object, yet they rarely settle into a single reading.
The tie fits unexpectedly well into such a world.
Its familiar outline slips naturally among these free forms.
As though it had always been a sign.
No longer only Dada
The relief was produced roughly a decade after the Cabaret Voltaire.
By then Arp had moved to Paris and entered the orbit of Surrealism. His work was included in the first group exhibition of Surrealist art at Galerie Pierre in Paris in 1925.
Princeton therefore places Shirtfront and Necktie within an intriguing transitional period: it retains the Dadaist impulse to recontextualise everyday things while also engaging Surrealist association and increasingly organic forms.
This helps explain why the work is not cold geometry.
Its shapes are not perfectly regular.
They are soft. Awkward. Almost alive.
As though the shirt and tie were in the process of becoming something else.
Humour without caricature
Humour was never absent from Arp’s art.
His titles refer to moustaches, navels, forks, heads, bottles and other objects brought together in unexpected ways.
His second wife, Marguerite Hagenbach, later identified the ‘shirt-front’ works among the characteristic motifs of his post-Dada or Surrealist period and described the kind of Dada picture-writing that Arp developed in these reliefs.
There is humour in Shirtfront and Necktie as well.
Not because the tie is mocked.
The humour comes through recognition.
We look at several abstract planes.
Then suddenly we see: a shirt. A tie.
And once seen, they cannot be unseen.
The tie before words
Perhaps this is why the work matters so much within a history of the tie in art.
For Arp, the tie is not important because of material, craftsmanship, status or the identity of its wearer.
It has been reduced almost to a minimum.
To what comes before detail.
To shape.
To sign.
And that sign proves strong enough to converse with entirely different forms – even with a mark carved into stone thousands of years ago.
The tie has lost its silk.
Its wearer.
Its knot that could once be untied.
But it has not disappeared.
Perhaps it is precisely then that we see it most clearly.
