Ohne titel (Sonnenberg)

Around 1926 Schwitters’ Constructivist development of the “Merzbild”—a picture assembled from the detritus of everyday life into a new, cohesive and aesthetically pleasing order—had reached a turning point. In the mid-1920s 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, Schwitters had been drawn to the ideal of integrating the constructive principle that their art revealed, into the wider realms of life itself. Part of a search for a gesamtkunstwerk, or total-work-of-art, it was towards this end that Schwitters had persisted in the laborious and time-consuming construction of an entire Merz environment: his Merzbau or Merz-House, constructed out of found fragments in his home in Hanover throughout the 1920s. By the late 1920s however, Schwitters had grown aware of the limitations that reducing his art of assemblage to the mere geometry of the Constructivist style produced and was now seeking to allow each “element” of his art to function more naturally and autonomously as a unit of meaning in a more “universal” way.
Fusing the chaotic, deconstructive aesthetics of Dada and his early Merz pictures with the ordering principles he had found first in Piet Mondrian and Theo Van Doesburg’s de Stijl, and then in the Constructivism of artists like László Moholy-Nagy and El Lisstitzky, Schwitters sought now to create a mature form of Merz that aimed to expose and articulate the inner rhythm of nature running through all his assembled forms. “Nature of Chance often carries together things which correspond to that which we call rhythm,” Schwitters wrote, “the only task of the artist is to recognize and limit, to limit and recognize” (Kurt Schwitters, “Kunst und Zeiten,” quoted in J. Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 189).