.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
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.
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).
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).