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Merzzeichnung. Oil and paper collage on card 14 x 10.7 cm, mounted on paper 22.3 x 16.4 cm, firmly mounted on thicker support, with wooden strips, framed box-like under glass. Signed and dated 'Kurt Schwitters 1947' on the original paper support lower left, and titled 'Mz x 13 BY' lower right. - The paper support with fox marks and slightly browned in the corners. Otherwise in good condition. Orchard/Schulz 3444 Provenance The Pinacotheca, New York 1947-48 (commission; gallery label included); Swetzoff Gallery, Boston/Massachusetts, 1963 (acquired); Leonard and Jean Brown, Springfield/Massachusetts, until 1966 (acquired); Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan M. Brown, New York, since 1966 (inherited) Exhibition New York 1948 (The Pinacotheca), Kurt Schwitters, cat. no. 14; Princeton 1981 (The Art Museum, Princeton University), Princeton Alumni Collections. Works on Paper, with illus. p. 218 Kurt Schwitters' artistic principle "Merz" was defined by him as "creating relationships, preferably between everything on earth". Chance, and the playful use of coincidence, even gave the impulse for the choice of the syllable after which the art form was named. In the 1920s, Kurt Schwitters thus created his revolutionary, all-encompassing artistic world, possibly including all areas of life. He continued it's development until his death in 1948. His main medium was collage, or assemblage, using various materials from numerous different sources. He referred to plane collages as "Merzzeichnungen" (Merz drawings) and three dimensional assemblages as "Merzbilder" (Merz images). Through these combinations of found objects, the artist created new relationships between the various pieces. Their value was enhanced or decreased according to his own definitions: They relinquished their original function and lost their significance as materials, whilst at the same time gaining a new unexpected importance within an image. Each collage became an artistic micro cosmos with its own levels and grammar of meaning. At the same time, "Merz" was ideologically and stylistically a fully open matter. "The radical openness of MERZ was a result of the direct influence of Schwitters' life on his art: His personal experience became a part of this art, and thus MERZ recorded the traces of his life, which become "de-formalised" and "obscure". [...] For Schwitters' art, these were the extremely different impressions of the surroundings in and from which he worked - Hannover, Norway, England, the city and the countryside. He responded by the choice of materials and pictorial relationships to which he subjected his chosen elements." ( Joachim Büchner, Kurt Schwitters und MERZ, in: Kurt Schwitters 1887-1948, exhib. Cat. Sprengel Museum Hannover 1986, p. 14).