Jean Arp was born in Strasbourg on September 16, 1886. The son of an Alsatian mother and a non-Alsatian German father, he was born during the brief period following the Franco-Prussian War when the area was known as Alsace-Lorraine after it had been returned to Germany by France. Following the return of Alsace to France at the end of World War I, French law determined that his name would become Jean.

In 1904, after studying at the École des Arts et Métiers in Strasbourg, he went to Paris where he published his poetry for the first time. From 1905 to 1907, Arp studied at the Kunstschule, Weimar in Germany and in 1908 went back to Paris, where he attended the Académie Julian.

Arp was one of the founding members of the Dada movement in Zürich in 1916. In 1920, Hans Arp, along with Max Ernst, and the social activist Alfred Grünwald, he set up the Cologne Dada group. However, in 1925 his work also appeared in the first exhibition of the surrealist group at the Galerie Pierre in Paris.

In 1926, Arp moved to the Paris suburb of Meudon. In 1931, he broke with surrealism to found abstraction-création.

Throughout the 1930s and towards the end of his life, he wrote and published essays and poetry. In 1942, he fled from his home in Meudon to escape German occupation and lived in Zürich until the war ended.

Arp visited New York City in 1949 for a solo exhibition at the Buchholz Gallery. In 1950, he was invited to execute a relief for the Harvard University Graduate Center in Cambridge. In 1954, Arp won the Grand Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale.

In 1958, a retrospective of his work was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, followed by an exhibition at the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, France, in 1962. Arp died June 7, 1966 in Basel, Switzerland.