Kurt Schwitters: Merz (2016) – Norman Rosenthal interviews Damien Hirst

132
THE ELOQUENCE OF WASTE· by Karin Orchard
Mark Rothko in 1953, and Robert Motherwell
the year after that. Sidney Janis’ practice was
to show these younger artists either together
with or alternately with established exponents
of Classical Modernism such as Fernand Léger
or Piet Mondrian, in order to break down the
wider public’s resistance to new art forms.
One of the modernists, whom he exhibited
very frequently in the years to come, was Kurt
Schwitters. Shortly after the latter’s death,
Janis had made contact with Edith Thomas,
Schwitters’ companion during the last years of
his life in England, and had acquired a large
number of works from her, either buying them
directly or taking them on commission. These
were predominantly collages from Schwitters’
late period in England, since the artist had
had to leave his early works and his large
Merz pictures behind in Lysaker and Hanover
when he fled to England. Thus the American
public was much more familiar than its
European counterpart with the late collages
from the ensembles on loan to MoMA from
Rose Fried and Edith Thomas. 27 In contrast to
the rediscovery of the Merz artist in post-war
Europe, which – largely due to the preferences
of Werner Schmalenbach and the artist’s son,
Ernst Schwitters – concentrated on the early
‘classical’ Merz drawings and pictures, there
27
For more detail see Karin Orchard, ‘>Meine Zeit wird kommen