Lot 10 | Kurt Schwitters
1887 Hannover - 1948 Ambleside | Mz 246. rot und gestreift

"You can also shout with garbage scraps, and that's what I did by gluing and nailing them together. I called it Merz, but it was my prayer about the victorious outcome of the war, because once again peace had triumphed. Everything was broken anyway, and it was necessary to build something new from the broken pieces. But that is Merz." (Kurt Schwitters quoted after: Lach, Friedhelm (ed.): Kurt Schwitters - Das literarische Werk, vol. 5. manifestos and critical prose, Cologne 1981, p. 335).

Kurt Schwitters is a manic collector. He literally picks up everything used and discarded that he happens to find, in order to subtly incorporate these useless things into his abstract works. In the dense order of the collages and assemblages, which he partially paints over, he integrates them into a new - meaningless - context and thus gives them a reclaimed existence. In doing so, his interest is not focused on a "simple" play of forms, but on revealing the fractures and disjointedness that society after World War I reflects.
Schwitters ironically calls his art Merz-Kunst, with which he transgresses the boundaries of traditional painting. He derived this designation from the word "Commerz," which he found on a scrap of paper. With the term "Merz", however, he does not want to categorize his works. Rather, he is referring to his life, which is inevitably linked to his art. In this way, he declares his life to be a total work of art.

Schwitterts dedicates our small collage, created in 1921, to Johannes Molzahn. The two got to know each other in 1919 at the latest, when they exhibited together at the Sturm Gallery in Berlin. It is not only progressive artistic ideas that connect them. Both worked as type and advertising designers to earn a living. Here, too, they follow similar paths, because for them commercial art is no less important than the high arts. They express their novel thoughts in theoretical writings, with which they make also an important contribution to the further development of typography and advertising graphics. Schwitters' enthusiasm for his colleague is shown by the fact that he writes the poem "An Johannes Molzahn" for him and publishes it in his booklet "Anna Blume" in 1919 (poem 37). The artists maintained close in the following years, as is also evidenced by the postcard from Schwitters to Molzahn dated October 14, 1921 (see Lot 11).