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Lot Essay
The work is inscribed on the reverse of the mount 'Prel. Oeuvre-Nr.: 1930, 1132.'
The strict rectangular logic with which Merz 30, 21 has been assembled reflects Schwitters' interest in the aesthetics of International Constructivism - a movement with which the artist was closely associated throughout the late 1920s. Establishing close collaborative contacts with such pioneers of constructivist art as Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky or Theo Van Doesburg, Schwitters' Merzbilder were for many years merged with the utopian aims of these artists.
Merz 30, 21 is a simple construction utilising numerous scraps and clippings all cut into rectangular shapes and layered into a geometric grid of form that seems to speak of an underlying ordering principle beneath the written and pictorial forms of urban daily life. Included within this highly structured composition is a tram ticket from Berlin's West-End and at the centre of the work a ticket from Cassel to Lüneburg. Lüneburg, north of Hannover, here written boldly at the centre of the work was one of Schwitters' favoured adoptive homes. As his neighbour and friend Kate Steinitz has recalled, 'Was Kurt really born in Hannover? Biographies and documents seem to confirm it: yet he often pretended he was born in Einbeck or Lüneberg or even somewhere else. He had lots of birthplaces, like Homer or Modern Art! Sometimes, as it pleased him, he even claimed a foreign birthplace, giving out odd town names of his own invention. He thought of himself as a citizen of the world, but with the form and substance of a Hannoverian.' (Kate Trauman Steinitz, Kurt Schwitters, A Portrait from Life, Berkeley, 1968, p. 5).
The strict rectangular logic with which Merz 30, 21 has been assembled reflects Schwitters' interest in the aesthetics of International Constructivism - a movement with which the artist was closely associated throughout the late 1920s. Establishing close collaborative contacts with such pioneers of constructivist art as Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky or Theo Van Doesburg, Schwitters' Merzbilder were for many years merged with the utopian aims of these artists.
Merz 30, 21 is a simple construction utilising numerous scraps and clippings all cut into rectangular shapes and layered into a geometric grid of form that seems to speak of an underlying ordering principle beneath the written and pictorial forms of urban daily life. Included within this highly structured composition is a tram ticket from Berlin's West-End and at the centre of the work a ticket from Cassel to Lüneburg. Lüneburg, north of Hannover, here written boldly at the centre of the work was one of Schwitters' favoured adoptive homes. As his neighbour and friend Kate Steinitz has recalled, 'Was Kurt really born in Hannover? Biographies and documents seem to confirm it: yet he often pretended he was born in Einbeck or Lüneberg or even somewhere else. He had lots of birthplaces, like Homer or Modern Art! Sometimes, as it pleased him, he even claimed a foreign birthplace, giving out odd town names of his own invention. He thought of himself as a citizen of the world, but with the form and substance of a Hannoverian.' (Kate Trauman Steinitz, Kurt Schwitters, A Portrait from Life, Berkeley, 1968, p. 5).