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Lot Essay
'Modern art, following a completely intuitive and independent course, has reached the same results as modern science. Like science, it has reduced form to its basic elements in order to reconstruct it according to the universal laws of nature; and in doing this, both have arrived at the same formula: Every form is the frozen instantaneous picture of a process.'Thus a work of art is a stopping place in the road of becoming and the fixed goal.'(El Lissitzky and Kurt Schwitters, Nasci 1924 reproduced in J. Elderfield Kurt Schwitters exh. cat. New York 1985, p. 137)
By 1929 Schwitters' concept of the 'Merzbild' - a picture constructed from the detritus of everyday life and assembled into a new, cohesive and aesthetically pleasing order - was well established. In the mid 1920s Schwitters, along with a wide range of former Dadaists and constructivist artists such as El Lissitzky, with whom he collaborated on a number of projects at this time, were drawn to the ideal of integrating the constructive principle, revealed in their art, into life. It was towards this end that Schwitters persisted in the laborious and time-consuming construction of his Merzbau or Merz-House in his home in Hannover throughout the 1920s (Fig. 1). By the late 1920s Schwitters had become aware of the limitations that reducing his art of assemblage to the mere geometry of the Constructivist style produced, and was seeking in his work to reintegrate the constructive logic of Merz with the organic forms of nature.
Ohne Titel (ereid) is an outstanding Merzbild from 1929, in which a spatial build up of geometric elements is harmonised into a complete composition over a varied and more textural surface of the kind of his first Merzbilds of 1919. Incorporating tram tickets, printed and photographic imagery, the structure of the work echoes the new blend of more fluid and organic construction, that he was also developing in the plaster columns of his Merzbau at this time.
K. Switters, Der Merzbau, 1933.
© DACS 2006
By 1929 Schwitters' concept of the 'Merzbild' - a picture constructed from the detritus of everyday life and assembled into a new, cohesive and aesthetically pleasing order - was well established. In the mid 1920s Schwitters, along with a wide range of former Dadaists and constructivist artists such as El Lissitzky, with whom he collaborated on a number of projects at this time, were drawn to the ideal of integrating the constructive principle, revealed in their art, into life. It was towards this end that Schwitters persisted in the laborious and time-consuming construction of his Merzbau or Merz-House in his home in Hannover throughout the 1920s (Fig. 1). By the late 1920s Schwitters had become aware of the limitations that reducing his art of assemblage to the mere geometry of the Constructivist style produced, and was seeking in his work to reintegrate the constructive logic of Merz with the organic forms of nature.
Ohne Titel (ereid) is an outstanding Merzbild from 1929, in which a spatial build up of geometric elements is harmonised into a complete composition over a varied and more textural surface of the kind of his first Merzbilds of 1919. Incorporating tram tickets, printed and photographic imagery, the structure of the work echoes the new blend of more fluid and organic construction, that he was also developing in the plaster columns of his Merzbau at this time.
K. Switters, Der Merzbau, 1933.
© DACS 2006