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

All this changed at a stroke with the first great Schwitters Exhibition held in the spring
of 1956 by the famous Kestner-Gesellschaft art society in Hanover, once a favourite of
Schwitters himself, and thereafter shown in the public galleries of Amsterdam, Brussels
and Berne. The work of the artist’s whole lifetime, a large part of which had been hidden
away in unopened cases somewhere near Oslo ever since Schwitters’ emigration, for the
first time saw the light of day. The exhibition moved like a triumphal procession through
Europe: the startling revelation of an artist who had been noticed with amusement in his
time, but never regarded as an outstanding figure of modern art. Now Schwitters’ name
was on the map, no longer merely as an artistic clown and scourge of the bourgeoisie
who had presided over his one-man- Dadaism more than 30 years ago in Hanover
(albeit with some reverberations in the rest of Europe), but the name of one of the most
considerable artists of his time.
The time was ripe for him now: otherwise he would hardly have had such a sudden
incendiary effect. In the late Fifties a strong neo-Dadaist element was emerging – a
reaction against Abstract Expressionism – with such artists as Robert Rauschenberg
and Jasper Johns. In France at the same time there was a parallel movement which
called itself “Nouveau Réalisme” and also harked back to Dada. Everywhere collage
and montage were making a comeback, scrap materials were invading the art scene; it
was no longer the ‘law of chance’ that governed the movement of the brush, as with the
Abstract Expressonists, but the choice and juxtaposition of all possible and impossible
everyday objects and waste materials; and new – old – names were appearing in the
artists’ precursors’ gallery: beside the Surrealists, with their cult of the ‘objet trouvé’
and their ideology based on the principle of free association, there were two above all
who are venerated to this day as the fathers – or grandfathers – of recent art: Marcel
Duchamp and Kurt Schwitters.
Duchamp and Schwitters: without those two, both of whom had stopped working
by 1950 – one by a conscious decision, the other through death – no history of art after
1950 could be written.
It was mainly the early, Dada-orientated Schwitters who influenced and entranced the
public and, above all, other artists in that historic atmosphere around 1960: the large-scale
collages of the Twenties – MERZ pictures, as Schwitters called them – with their decayed
ingredients, their flaunted disorder and their secret order, and their expressive intensity,
which was decidedly left over from the Expressionism which Schwitters had briefly breezed
through just before; and also the hundreds of small-sized collages of all kinds of waste paper,
their brilliant play between wilfulness and will, accident and law, form and its dissolution.
With all this Schwitters entered deeply into the consciousness of contemporary artists. Any
mention of Schwitters usually referred to this early ‘classical’ phase of his work.
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