Lot Essay
Schwitters' oeuvre was in the main composed of remarkable constructions from all manner of materials; beginning with combinations of paper,cardboard and paint; and evolving into more elaborate assemblages of 'found' objects, including shells, scrap metal and wood. Schwitters named his creations Merzbilder explaining "I use any material that the picture calls for. By bringing different material into play I have an advantage over those who paint solely in oils, since I not only match and contrast colour with colour, line with line, form with form and so on, but also one material with another, for instance wood with sacking. I have given the name Merz to the philosophy that gave birth to this form of artistic production..When I invented the name Merz, it had no artistic meaning; now it has the meaning I gave it...Merz demands liberation from all shackles that impede the production of art...Every artist who is capable of making a picture should be allowed to make it out of bits of blotting paper if he chooses...I stuck together pictures and drawings so that sentences could be read from them. I nailed together pictures so as to produce the plastic effect of relief as well as the pictorial effect."(Exh. cat., Kurt Schwitters, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1981). The present work, entitled Over Here, Over There, can be considered an archetypal 'Merz creation'. Within a wooden frame Schwitters has built up a relief of delapidated materials, using rough pieces of wood and fragments of a wheel against a background of newspaper cuttings, scraps of wastepaper and cardboard. The word 'Merz', cut from one of his broadsheets, serves as the focal point of the composition.
This work was executed after Schwitters had taken up residence in England in 1940. He had been arrested and placed in a succession of camps as an illegal alien. Despite this he had continued working, constructing sculptures and collages from whatever materials he could acquire: "The sympathetic camp commander allowed him to use his garret room as a studio and, in it, Fred Uhlman writes,'hung his collages made of cigarette packets, seaweed, shells, pieces of cork, string, wire, glass and nails...the space was taken up with paintings of all kinds done on lino, which came from the floor of our lodgings." (J.Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, London, 1985). Bearing this in mind it is not surprising that the collages produced in these years are an elaborate amalgamation of objets trouvés Elderfield ackowledges that in such works "the a priori compositional approach of the early Merzbilder and of most of the Constructivist style reliefs is replaced by a more casual and improvisatory order, discovered in the materials themselves," (ibid, p.316) and this is more than apparent in this assemblage.
It was at this time that the Schwitters met artists and critics such as Herbert Read, Roland Penrose, Jack Bilbo and E. L. T. Mesens who arranged exhibitions of his work. Jack Bilbo, the "kunst-gangster", as Schwitters called him, hosted Schwitters' first one-man exhibition of paintings and sculpture at The Modern Art Gallery in London in 1944, where the present work was exhibited.
Herbert Read expressed his admiration for Schwitters and his creations on display in the preface to the exhibition catalogue : "From the beginning Schwitters had a manner of his own, to which he gave the name Merz...Schwitters has shown that it is possible to make art out of anything...Used tram-tickets, pieces of cardboard or corrugated paper, corks, matches, all is grist to the creative imagination, and Schwitters has pursued this line of development far beyond the point reached by Juan Gris and Picasso. Schwitters is the supreme master of the collage.
There is of course, a philosophical, even mystical justification for taking up stones which the builders rejected and making something of them...(Schwitters) leaves his edges rough, his surfaces uneven. He realizes that the created object is always an approximation to the imaginative conception, and that it is only the fussy and irrelevant intellect that would like to give precision to the organic reality of art.
This artist has been too modest. He has not been boosted by the critics and dealers to the same extent as some of his contemporaries. He is, nevertheless, one of the most genuine artists in the modern movement, and this exhibition will, I hope, be welcomed as a tardy recognition of that fact." (H. Read, Exh. cat., Paintings and Sculpture by Kurt Schwitters, London, 1944)
Schwitters recited some of his own Merz poetry at the opening night of this exhibition which again won considerable praise from Read. Schwitters had written abstract poetry and prose throughout his life, and his Merz poems often bear a direct relationship to his collages, composed of disjointed phrases, slogans and words. The fusion of the two art forms makes explicit his desire to break down all the barriers in art.
This work has not been publicly exhibited since it was purchased at The Modern Art Gallery exhibition in 1944.
This work was executed after Schwitters had taken up residence in England in 1940. He had been arrested and placed in a succession of camps as an illegal alien. Despite this he had continued working, constructing sculptures and collages from whatever materials he could acquire: "The sympathetic camp commander allowed him to use his garret room as a studio and, in it, Fred Uhlman writes,'hung his collages made of cigarette packets, seaweed, shells, pieces of cork, string, wire, glass and nails...the space was taken up with paintings of all kinds done on lino, which came from the floor of our lodgings." (J.Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, London, 1985). Bearing this in mind it is not surprising that the collages produced in these years are an elaborate amalgamation of objets trouvés Elderfield ackowledges that in such works "the a priori compositional approach of the early Merzbilder and of most of the Constructivist style reliefs is replaced by a more casual and improvisatory order, discovered in the materials themselves," (ibid, p.316) and this is more than apparent in this assemblage.
It was at this time that the Schwitters met artists and critics such as Herbert Read, Roland Penrose, Jack Bilbo and E. L. T. Mesens who arranged exhibitions of his work. Jack Bilbo, the "kunst-gangster", as Schwitters called him, hosted Schwitters' first one-man exhibition of paintings and sculpture at The Modern Art Gallery in London in 1944, where the present work was exhibited.
Herbert Read expressed his admiration for Schwitters and his creations on display in the preface to the exhibition catalogue : "From the beginning Schwitters had a manner of his own, to which he gave the name Merz...Schwitters has shown that it is possible to make art out of anything...Used tram-tickets, pieces of cardboard or corrugated paper, corks, matches, all is grist to the creative imagination, and Schwitters has pursued this line of development far beyond the point reached by Juan Gris and Picasso. Schwitters is the supreme master of the collage.
There is of course, a philosophical, even mystical justification for taking up stones which the builders rejected and making something of them...(Schwitters) leaves his edges rough, his surfaces uneven. He realizes that the created object is always an approximation to the imaginative conception, and that it is only the fussy and irrelevant intellect that would like to give precision to the organic reality of art.
This artist has been too modest. He has not been boosted by the critics and dealers to the same extent as some of his contemporaries. He is, nevertheless, one of the most genuine artists in the modern movement, and this exhibition will, I hope, be welcomed as a tardy recognition of that fact." (H. Read, Exh. cat., Paintings and Sculpture by Kurt Schwitters, London, 1944)
Schwitters recited some of his own Merz poetry at the opening night of this exhibition which again won considerable praise from Read. Schwitters had written abstract poetry and prose throughout his life, and his Merz poems often bear a direct relationship to his collages, composed of disjointed phrases, slogans and words. The fusion of the two art forms makes explicit his desire to break down all the barriers in art.
This work has not been publicly exhibited since it was purchased at The Modern Art Gallery exhibition in 1944.