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

INTRODUCTION TO THE LIFE AND WORK OF KURT SCHWITTERS · by Siegfried Gohr
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to the artist, the poet and man of letters, Schwitters, stepped onto the public stage.
The echo was mixed, as was to be expected at the time. Despite the lifelong negative,
hostile and deprecatory reactions to his art, Schwitters did not allow himself to be
deterred, insisting on his Merz method, apparently unshaken. During the 1920s,
despite all resistance, he became well-known and admired, but was also ridiculed and
insulted. The acme of his activities was the ‘Dada campaign’ through the Netherlands
in 1922/23. His restless activity led Schwitters to found the Merz publishing house.
He published literary works such as Auguste Bolte elsewhere. A total of 21 Merz
periodicals appeared in his publishing house between 1923 and 1932, when the
Ursonate appeared in Jan Tschichold’s typography. Schwitters earned his living also as
an advertising graphic artist, e.g. for the Pelikan works in Hanover and the Dammerstock
settlement in Karlsruhe. These works show the temporary influence of Dutch
and Russian constructivism. In the Netherlands in 1917, the association of artists,
De Stijl, had been founded under the theoretical leadership of Theo van Doesburg.
During the 1920s, Schwitters sought contact. Schwitters approached the austere,
sparing art of the Dutch, which comprised also architecture and everyday design. Of
course, he was not at all inclined to bend to any kind of aesthetic dogma; therefore
his ‘constructivism’ remains individual, and he always holds in store surprising turns
and details. Apart from that, Schwitters combined colours very idiosyncratically, far
removed from colleagues such as Piet Mondrian or Bart van der Leck. Apart from
trips, lectures, correspondence, contacts, there remained in the background as a
constant his work on the Merzbau, whose initial traces lead back to the year 1923;
a ‘column’ had arisen. Ultimately, the architecture, the grottoes, the concentrations
of material proliferated throughout the house at Waldhausenstr. 5 so that in the end,
eight rooms and even a platform for sunbathing on the roof had come about. In
1943, the building, including the Merzbau, was destroyed by an incendiary bomb.
Three further Merzbau which Schwitters erected during exile in Norway and Britain
were destroyed or have decayed. Of the centre of what he viewed as his life’s work,
tragically, apart from a few fragments, nothing has remained.
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Although Schwitters had had several stays in Norway starting in 1929, he did
not consider emigrating. However, when he received news in 1939 that the Gestapo
was looking for him, it became inconceivable for him to return to Hanover. After Hitler’s
takeover of power in 1933, the avant-garde in Germany had a difficult time. All
the compulsory measures taken against modern artists and their works reached
their crescendo with the project, Degenerate Art, which resulted in the defamatory
Kurt Merz Schwitters, Auguste Bolte, Verlag Der Sturm, Berlin 1923