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

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All art of any significance comes from art
and will also continually generate new art. As
Kurt Schwitters wrote in an article dated 1940-
46, in somewhat broken English:
When I was born. 20.6.87, I was influenced
by Picasso to cry. When I could walk
and speak I still stood under Picasso’s
influence and said to my mother: “Tom”
or “Happening” meaning the entrances of
the canal under the street. 1
He continues, after invoking Matisse,
Mondrian, the Surrealists, Hans Arp, Di
Chirico, by claiming he “never stood under
the influence of Dadaism” and that rather, in
1919, he created Merz on the Leineriver (in his
home town of Hanover) ”under the influence of
Rembrandt”. 2 Arguably, the only work in this
exhibition that demonstrates the direct influence
of any other artist is a drawing made in 1918
called The Lonely One, which takes techniques
and motifs from Lyonel Feininger and Ernst
Ludwig Kirchner. Earlier, as a young man,
he had studied at the Dresden Arts Academy
and as late as 1915 painted competently in a
traditional manner redolent of Adolph Menzel
or Wilhelm Leibl. As with Max Beckmann,
the experience and knowledge of the horrors
of the First World War changed everything.
Subsequently, Schwitters was to become one
the twentieth century’s truest originals, whose
invention of collage sourced almost exclusively
from the detritus of everyday life – from bus
tickets to the torn pages of newspapers,
splintered wood salvaged from rubbish heaps,
shorelines or forests, to letters and numbers
always pregnant with poetic meaning and
implied sounds, like Cagean musical scores that
anticipate the American composer’s chance
operations. His is an art of the street and the
1
Kurt Schwitters, Eile ist des Witzes Weile: Eine Auswahl aus den
Texten, Reclam, Stuttgart 2009, p. 17.
2
Ibid.
Kurt Schwitters
Z 71 Der Einsame. (2)
1918
Charcoal on paper
32.4 x 23.3 cm
Galerie Gmurzynska
Lyonel Feininger, Cathedral, 1919
Title page for Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus
manifesto and program.
31,0 x 19,1 cm
© bpk / Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz /
László Tóth
WWI Image of soldiers
in a trench Asleep within
100 yards of Thiepval
Courtesy The National
Library of Scotland