Kurt Schwitters: Color & Collage

“To walk through it is to penetrate a surreal environment of tables without chairs, art objects creeping around each corner, useless shelves with minimalist sculptures, and fake windows, all set among absurd angles of black and white scaffolding dappled here and there with red.”

Kurt Schwitters: Color & Collage
Princeton University Art Museum through June 26, 2011
Valery Oisteanu

Kurt Schwitters, a “grandfather figure” of the avant-garde in his native Germany and a master of European Dada and Surrealism, is finally conquering the hearts and minds of Americans thanks to this “extreme collage” experience, curated by Isabel Schultz (of Kurt Schwitters Archive at the Sprengel Museum, Hannover) in collaboration with Menil director Josef Helfenstein. It is well worth the long trip to New Jersey.

A Renaissance Dadaist, Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) broke all the traditional art-laws with his Ursonate dada performances, abstract-cubist collages assemblages, theoretical essays, and architectural works—and these are just some of the stages he went through in a one-man revolution in performance, collage, installation, and sound poetry.

A scholarly selection of 78 collages, sculptural assemblages, and recorded performance, this is the first major exhibition of the artist since a 1985 retrospective at MoMA, with the addition of a walk-in sculptural environment—a reconstructed installation of Merzbau.

For Schwitters, Merz, taken from Kommerz Bank, defined “creation through destruction,” a philosophy borrowed from Nietzsche’s The Will to Power. Nietzsche had a dream of Gesamt Kunstwerk, a union of all the arts, a theatrical spectacle in which the spirit of art flowers with music and the rest. The principles of Merz: Formung und Entformung (Shaping and Ejection) are a momentary coalescence of opposing objects and an alchemy of found objects.

In 1918, while on a visit to Berlin from his native Hanover, Schwitters coined his signature phrase of introduction: “I am a painter, I nail my pictures.” By 1920 he published his Dada-book of poems, Anna Blume and exhibited collages at Der Sturm Gallery; yet the president of the International Dada Fair, Richard Hülsenbeck, would not accept him into his clique. Schwitters was too hip even for the Berlin-Dada club.

Unfazed, he made a clear distinction between hardcore Dadaists such as Tzara, Arp, Picabia, Duchamp, and the “Hüsel-Dadaists” or “corn-husk Dadas”—dilettantes associated with Hülsenbeck’s carnival. “Dada is the distinctive sign of abstraction!” was Schwitters dictum. After a short stint in the army (scrambling the files that traced deserters), Schwitters discovered a “love for the wheel and recognition that machines are obstructions of human spirit.” During that period, his collages were time capsules, scraps of cultural anthropological evidence: bits of textiles, newspapers, antique lace, corrugated cardboard, pictures, all covered over with paint. The basic components of his newly discovered Merz ethos were dented wheels, broken hoops, wire and bits of wood nailed together. However absurd the material utilized, he integrated them into Zen-like, color-balanced compositions, combining impulsive abstraction and chance operation in collages of found objects and memorabilia.

Kurt Schwitters, Merz 1926, 3. Cicero, 1926. Paint on wood nailed on wood, 27 x 19.5 in. Photo Credit: Michael Herling/ Aline Gwose. Courtesy of Sprengel Museum Hannover.

In 1919, Schwitters started the first of three Merzbau, The Cathedral of Erotic Misery, in his three-story house in Hannover, creating a floor-to-ceiling assemblage. Hidden within a cubist scaffolding were secret grottos: Goethe Grotto, Sexual Murder Den, Nibelungen Hoard, Art Exhibit, and others. The inner passageways were made out of glass and punctuated by various enclosures, niches and caves, all of which functioned as one giant art display. The structure feels organic, but cold, both private and public, absurd but making some sense. Merzbau I, “unfinished out of principle,” was abandoned in 1937 when Schwitters—proclaimed by the Nazis a degenerate artist!—fled to Norway. Merzbau I was destroyed by allied bombing in 1943. In Norway, Schwitters built Merz II (destroyed by fire in 1951) and, again fleeing the Nazis, began a third construction in Elderwater, England, under the title Merz-Barn.

For this exhibit, Swiss artist Peter Bessegger has created a full-scale reconstruction of Merz I using photos of the original made in 1933 as a guide. To walk through it is to penetrate a surreal environment of tables without chairs, art objects creeping around each corner, useless shelves with minimalist sculptures, and fake windows, all set among absurd angles of black and white scaffolding dappled here and there with red.

This architectural marvel, so cynically luxurious though made out of trash, stands proof that Schwitters made a leap into the fifth dimension—a man-made landscape of discarded objects and a fusion between collage and painting.

Many contemporary artists such as Robert Raushenberg, Damien Hirst, and Joseph Beuys consciously extended the Merz-experiment, and many artists of today are following in this “avant-god’s” footsteps. The magic dada-show will travel later this year to the University of California, Berkley Art Museum.