작품 상세

Signed in pencil 'Kurt Schwitters' on the original card support lower right and titled 'Mz. RE' lower left. Kurt Schwitters developed the ideologically and stylistically open "Merz" concept, which is associated with Dadaism, in the early 1920s and pursued it with great productivity until his death in 1949. While the concept spans different disciplines, its key principle is the transformation of non-art into art. Schwitters' collages and assemblages bring together a wide range of everyday found objects and detritus, imbue them with a new, loftier identity and, in transforming them, strip them of their original meaning and function. The present Merz picture is composed of scraps of paper in different colours with the occasional fragment of lettering and parts of envelopes with postmarks. The square and rectangular shapes of the paper form a harmonious arrangement reminiscent of Constructivist compositions. The title, as in many Merz pictures, draws on visible fragments of text - here the "RE" is taken from the upside down letters "ER" printed on dark violet ground in the lower left corner of the composition. "In his methods of composition, Schwitters reflects the dominant forms of contemporary visual rhetoric: concentric patterns suggest Cubism, diagonals draw on Russian Constructivism, grid patterns on De Stijl. Materials preferably tend to be arranged in circular, square or rectangular forms. The outlines of the shapes do not lend themselves to the morphological interpretations Picasso and Braque had cultivated in Analytic Cubism. The compositional elements appear misaligned, alienated and form signs which the viewer is supposed to read as metonyms. It is often difficult to tell what the original found objects were [...]. Schwitters calls this process 'removing the innate venom' from things. 'The work of art is produced by the artistic devaluation of its elements [...] What is essential is the process of forming.' The work has to find an equilibrium within itself." (Beat Wyss in: Kurt Schwitters. MERZ - ein Gesamtweltbild, exhib. cat. Museum Tinguely, Basel 2004, p. 78). 18.1 x 17.8 cm (image), 32.5 x 27.4 cm (size of card support)