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Lot Essay
‘One can .. shout out through refuse, and this is what I did, nailing and gluing it together. I called it ‘Merz’, it was a prayer about the victorious end of the war, victorious as once again peace had won in the end; everything had broken down in any case and new things had to be made out of fragments: and this is Merz. I painted, nailed, glued, composed poems, and experienced the world in Berlin’
KURT SCHWITTERS
‘Dr Koch ... took with him my Mz.333 and from Garvens, works by Klee, Grosz and Chagall. You have, of course, yourself, already seen his Dixian Salon’
KURT SCHWITTERS TO WALTER DEXEL, 1921
One of Kurt Schwitters' early Merzbilder (Merz-pictures), Merzbild 333 carries also the intriguing title of ‘Dixbild’ (Dix-picture). This is because it was acquired from Schwitters by Dr Hans Koch in October 1921. As a letter from Schwitters to his friend the Constructivist painter, Walter Dexel, on the 29th of October, 1921 attests: ‘Dr Koch ... took with him my Mz.333 and from Garvens, works by Klee, Grosz and Chagall. You have, of course, yourself, already seen his Dixian Salon’ (K. Schwitters, Letter, 29 Oct 1921, in E. Nündel (ed). Kurt Schwitters: Wir spielen, bis uns Tod abholt, Berlin, 1975, p. 53).
An affluent Düsseldorf physician, Dr Hans Koch was an important early collector of avant-garde art. Foremost amongst the artists whose work he collected was that of the then little-known, but soon to be infamous, Otto Dix whose two scandalous paintings of contemporary brothels, Salon I and Salon II, Koch had recently bought and installed in his home. Schwitters evidently knew of Dix’s work at this time, though he probably had not met the artist. He would probably also have been unaware that Dix had recently visited the Koch family for the very first time in October 1921 whereupon Dix and Hans Koch’s wife, Martha, had almost immediately fallen in love. The couple were to marry soon afterwards while Koch himself, happy about their match, was, in turn, to marry Martha’s sister.
In all other respects, Merzbild 333 is classic example of an early Schwitters Merz-collage, made at a time of hyper-inflation, revolution and counter-revolution in Germany following the end of the First World War. In this era of complete moral, political and financial bankruptcy, when paper currency had lost its value and only food, work or lodging remained commodities of real value (other than gold or foreign currency), Schwitters, alone in Hannover, had established his own one-man avant-garde and ‘cure’ for the current age. He declared this to be the ‘Merz’ revolution.
‘Merz’, which took its name from a fragment of the words ‘Kommerz und Privatbank’ was an artistic revolution in which art and life were to be merged through the ‘business’ of assembling fragments and detritus of modern life into new glorified forms and expressions of the triumph of the human spirit. As Schwitters’ friend and neighbour in Hannover, Kate Steinitz recalled, during this period Schwitters was frequently to be seen on the streets of Hannover, ‘a crazy, original genius-character, carelessly dressed, absorbed in his own thoughts, picking up all sorts of curious stuff in the streets... always getting down from his bike to pick up some colourful piece of paper that somebody had thrown away’ (K. Trauman Steinitz, Kurt Schwitters A Portrait from Life Berkeley, 1968, p. 68). From these fragments Schwitters constructed poetic and miraculous constellations that expressed a new formal language and seemed to hint at a hidden order amongst the apparent chaos of the times.
‘In poetry, words and sentences are nothing but parts,’ Schwitters explained, ‘their relation to one another is not the customary one of everyday speech, which after all has a different purpose: to express something. In poetry, words are torn from their former context, dissociated and brought into a new artistic context, they become formal parts of the poem, nothing more’ (K. Schwitters, quoted in J. Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, New York, 1985, p. 43).
In Merzbild 333 Schwitters has constructed a dynamic abstract composition of parts made up of labels, tram tickets, wrappers and cut out card that illustrates thus logic. Adding humour to this urban poetry of detritus and the fragmented, Schwitters has, in a move that anticipates Pop art by around forty years, appended on the back of the work the commercialised label ‘Kühl aufbewahren!’ (Store in a cold place!).
KURT SCHWITTERS
‘Dr Koch ... took with him my Mz.333 and from Garvens, works by Klee, Grosz and Chagall. You have, of course, yourself, already seen his Dixian Salon’
KURT SCHWITTERS TO WALTER DEXEL, 1921
One of Kurt Schwitters' early Merzbilder (Merz-pictures), Merzbild 333 carries also the intriguing title of ‘Dixbild’ (Dix-picture). This is because it was acquired from Schwitters by Dr Hans Koch in October 1921. As a letter from Schwitters to his friend the Constructivist painter, Walter Dexel, on the 29th of October, 1921 attests: ‘Dr Koch ... took with him my Mz.333 and from Garvens, works by Klee, Grosz and Chagall. You have, of course, yourself, already seen his Dixian Salon’ (K. Schwitters, Letter, 29 Oct 1921, in E. Nündel (ed). Kurt Schwitters: Wir spielen, bis uns Tod abholt, Berlin, 1975, p. 53).
An affluent Düsseldorf physician, Dr Hans Koch was an important early collector of avant-garde art. Foremost amongst the artists whose work he collected was that of the then little-known, but soon to be infamous, Otto Dix whose two scandalous paintings of contemporary brothels, Salon I and Salon II, Koch had recently bought and installed in his home. Schwitters evidently knew of Dix’s work at this time, though he probably had not met the artist. He would probably also have been unaware that Dix had recently visited the Koch family for the very first time in October 1921 whereupon Dix and Hans Koch’s wife, Martha, had almost immediately fallen in love. The couple were to marry soon afterwards while Koch himself, happy about their match, was, in turn, to marry Martha’s sister.
In all other respects, Merzbild 333 is classic example of an early Schwitters Merz-collage, made at a time of hyper-inflation, revolution and counter-revolution in Germany following the end of the First World War. In this era of complete moral, political and financial bankruptcy, when paper currency had lost its value and only food, work or lodging remained commodities of real value (other than gold or foreign currency), Schwitters, alone in Hannover, had established his own one-man avant-garde and ‘cure’ for the current age. He declared this to be the ‘Merz’ revolution.
‘Merz’, which took its name from a fragment of the words ‘Kommerz und Privatbank’ was an artistic revolution in which art and life were to be merged through the ‘business’ of assembling fragments and detritus of modern life into new glorified forms and expressions of the triumph of the human spirit. As Schwitters’ friend and neighbour in Hannover, Kate Steinitz recalled, during this period Schwitters was frequently to be seen on the streets of Hannover, ‘a crazy, original genius-character, carelessly dressed, absorbed in his own thoughts, picking up all sorts of curious stuff in the streets... always getting down from his bike to pick up some colourful piece of paper that somebody had thrown away’ (K. Trauman Steinitz, Kurt Schwitters A Portrait from Life Berkeley, 1968, p. 68). From these fragments Schwitters constructed poetic and miraculous constellations that expressed a new formal language and seemed to hint at a hidden order amongst the apparent chaos of the times.
‘In poetry, words and sentences are nothing but parts,’ Schwitters explained, ‘their relation to one another is not the customary one of everyday speech, which after all has a different purpose: to express something. In poetry, words are torn from their former context, dissociated and brought into a new artistic context, they become formal parts of the poem, nothing more’ (K. Schwitters, quoted in J. Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, New York, 1985, p. 43).
In Merzbild 333 Schwitters has constructed a dynamic abstract composition of parts made up of labels, tram tickets, wrappers and cut out card that illustrates thus logic. Adding humour to this urban poetry of detritus and the fragmented, Schwitters has, in a move that anticipates Pop art by around forty years, appended on the back of the work the commercialised label ‘Kühl aufbewahren!’ (Store in a cold place!).