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

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78 l [Commerce]. It originated from the Merzbild, a picture in which the word MERZ, cut-out and glued-on from an advertisement for the KOMMERZ- UND PRIVATBANK could be read in between abstract forms… ” 5 Construction for Noble Ladies, a ‘Merzbild’ of 1919, exemplifies this first group of Merz painting-assemblages. He arranged everything in a chaotic vortex of pigment and detritus: He fastened the tin lid of a paint can against the surface in the lower left and a spoked wheel in the upper right, next to a funnel with its phallic stem projecting straight out of the composition. He stuck on the remains of a larger, broken wheel at the center, above a receipt for shipping a bicycle by train. Two halves of a flattened toy train at the bottom and top of the right edge reinforce the diagonal thrust of a long wooden slat towards the upper right, and all of this belongs to a seamless and perfectly balanced totality with the other found objects and abstract forms in wood and metal, modulated by passages of expressionistic brushstrokes in oil paint. Just below and to the right of the center, and on its side, he placed an oil portrait of a “noble lady,” 6 anchoring the Futurist dynamism of the composition. Kurt Schwitters, Construction for Noble Ladies, 1919 Cardboard, wood, metal, and paint, 102.87 x 83.82cm Los Angeles (CA), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) Purchased with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Norton Simon,the Junior Arts Council, Mr. and Mrs. Frederick R. Weisman, Mr.and Mrs. Taft Schreiber, Hans de Schulthess, Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Janss, and Mr. and Mrs. Gifford Phillips © 2016. Digital Image Museum Associates/ LACMA/Art Resource NY/ Scala, Florence
l Like Kandinsky’s abstractions of the earlier teens, which Schwitters knew well, the swirl of elements in Construction for Noble Ladies destroys all sense of a ground plane while also dislocating the recognizable objects and images onto a level, semiotic field of abstraction. In this construction, each element maintains what Kandinsky called its “inner sound” 7 , an evocative cloud of association, utterly divorced from any kind of stable iconography but nevertheless maintaining an intuited meaning. The fragments in a Merzbild made physical, and in that sense real, the non-narrative and yet allusive character of the recognizable images in Kandinsky’s abstract paintings. The viewer experiences them as a subjective epiphany, rather than as a linear reading of content. “Any given abstract painting…is such an infinite multitude,” Schwitters wrote, that “no theory will ever manage to wholly comprehend it.” 8 Although the Berlin Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck took an immediate dislike to Schwitters – derisively writing that “he lived like a lower middle-class Victorian,” and calling him “the abstract Spitzweg” 9 – the other Dada artists in Berlin and Zürich welcomed Schwitters. He collaborated with Tristan Tzara and Hugo Ball, developed lasting relationships with Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Hans Arp as well as with the Russian artists El Lissitzky and Ivan Puni, the Dutch De Stijl founder Theo Van Doesburg, the Bauhaus architect Walter Gropius, and the Constructivist László Moholy-Nagy. Although based in Hanover, he thrust himself to the forefront of the contemporary avant-garde while at the same time maintaining his connection to the prewar Expressionism of Der Sturm. Schwitters was never a Dada artist as Tristan Tzara described it (at the 1922 Weimar Congress which Schwitters helped organize): “The beginnings of Dada were not the beginnings of art, but of disgust,” 10 and “There is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean.” 11 Nor was Schwitters a Constructivist, an Expressionist, an abstract Cubist, or a Futurist. Yet he was all of these at once. His was an all inclusive aesthetic of everything. 12 Schwitters swept in all the fragmented pieces of himself and of everything around him to make it all whole. Alves Baeselstiel, the protagonist in Schwitters’ 1919 short story Die Zwiebel [the Onion], narrates his own dismemberment with objective detachment and then reassembles himself, righting his parts by his own inner 5 Kurt Schwitters, “Katalog,” 1927, pp. 99-100, in Kurt Schwitters, Das literarische Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach, volume 5, DuMont, Cologne 1981, pp. 252-3; cited in John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, The Museum of Modern Art & Thames and Hudson, New York 1985, pp. 12-13. 6 A portrait of his wife Helma, according to Gisela Zankl-Wohltat, “Gedanken zum Frühwerk von Kurt Schwitters,” in Kurt Schwitters 1887-1948, exhibition catalog, Sprengel Museum, Hanover 1986, p. 35. Schwitters claimed that there were seven portraits in this painting in a Letter to Margaret Miller, December 11, 1946 [in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; cited in John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, The Museum of Modern Art & Thames and Hudson, New York 1985, p. 56], although no scholar has firmly identified any of them. Elderfield reports, based on Maurice Tuchman’s conversation with an old friend of Ivan Puni [ibid., p. 61.], that one of the “noble ladies” was Puni’s wife, Kseniya Boguslavskaya. 7 Kandinsky used the term “innere Klang” or “inner sound” frequently in this way, as, for example, in Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art, in Kenneth Lindsay and Peter Vergo, Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, G. K. Hall, Boston 1982, p. 218. The Der Sturm Gallery published Kandinsky’s book Klänge in 1913 and Schwitters read these books as well as Kandinsky’s essays the Blaue Reiter Almanac. 8 Kurt Schwitters, ”Meine Ansicht zum Bauhaus-Buch 9,” (April 26, 1927), in Kurt Schwitters, Das literarische Werk, ed. Friedhelm Lach, volume 5, DuMont, Cologne 1981, p. 256; cited in Isabel Schulz, “Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage,” in Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, ed. Isabel Schulz, The Menil Collection and Yale University Press, Houston and New Haven 2011, p. 61. 9 Richard Huelsenbeck, “Dada and Existentialism,” in Willy Verkauf, ed., Dada: Monograph of a Movement, 2 nd ed., Hastings House, New York 1961, p. 58. 10 Tristan Tzara, “Conference sur Dada,” Weimar Congress (1922) translated in Robert Motherwell, Dada: The Painters and the Poets, MA: G. K. Hall, Boston 1981, p. 250. 11 Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto” (1918) translated in Robert Motherwell, Dada: The Painters and the Poets, MA: G. K. Hall, Boston 1981, p. 81. 12 No wonder that his closest friend was Theo van Doesburg – simultaneously the founder of De Stijl and, under the pseudonym “Bonset,” a Dadaist. 79 SCHWITTERS: Tending the Enchanted Garden · by Jonathan Fineberg
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KURT SCHWIT TERS EXIBITION DESIGN B
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KURT SCHWIT TERS galerie gmurzynska
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“In part spurred by Rauschenberg
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SUMMARY 10 MERZ (Extract from “AR
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One could make up a catechism of me
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Merz House was my first piece of Me
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15 Kurt Schwitters (ed.), Merz 2. N
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17 Kurt Schwitters. Anna Blume. Dic
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t Page from Schwitters’ family al
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and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim, who
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collectors and leading institutions
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he also designed the catalogue: a p
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141 All art of any significance com
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143 The extraordinary American coll
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145 What Schwitters describes in th
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147 It is perhaps pertinently stran
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NR: Tell me, Damien, when did you f
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as important as Marcel Duchamp. DH:
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NR: So what happened to the house?
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“Imitation remains imitation. Imi
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Kurt Schwitters, Auwiese, 1920, new
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Hausmann, and Hannah Höch, all of
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In November, Schwitters publishes M
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several weeks later becomes dictato
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exhibition catalogue. In November 1
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Original Recordings by Kurt Schwitt
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Collage/Collages from Cubism to New
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1, 3, and 4. Ed. Perdita Lottner. E
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The Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Ka
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WWW.GMURZYNSKA.COM
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Kurt Schwitters: Merz (2016) – Norman Rosenthal interviews Damien Hirst

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