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

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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