Art: BIG DADA

I KNOW that I am important as a factor in the development of art and always will remain so,” Dadaist Kurt Schwitters wrote in 1931. “I say this with all possible emphasis so that nobody afterwards can say: The poor man didn’t even know how important he was.’ ” The Dadaists (among them Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst) took their name from a nonsense phrase, but thought they were making sense of a kind. In the disillusioned aftermath of World War I. Schwitters used the bric-a-brac of everyday life—fragments of newspapers, railroad maps, timetables, string, bottle caps, photographs—to assemble collages (see color) that were a twitting comment on bourgeois life and an already demolished world. To Schwitters a canceled imperial postage stamp represented the collapse of the Hohenzollerns. Schwitters’ collages were not meant merely to shock, annoy, puzzle or defy the conventions of society. “What we are expressing in our work,” he once said, “is neither idiocy nor subjective play, but the expression of our time as dictated by the time itself.”

Born in Hannover in 1887, Schwitters forsook the realism of his academic art training to become associated first with the sardonic Paul Klee, then with the Dadaists and such pioneer abstract painters as Piet Mondrian. But all his life Schwitters made a modest living painting realistic portraits aimed at pleasing the sitter. In 1919 he branched away from the Dadaists, founded his own movement, which he called Merz. The word had no meaning, but came from a fragment of a piece of newsprint bearing the phrase Commerz-und Privatbank that he had pasted on one of his collages. “Merz,” he wrote later, “stands for freedom from all fetters, for the sake of artistic creation.”

Between 1923 and 1932 Schwitters published Merz magazine, in which he printed his own poems, views on art and passionate vindications of his use of rubbish in collages. As his movement flourished, he built a Merzbau in Hannover, where disciples could touch a rag that Schwitters asserted was Goethe’s stocking, and a bottle of yellow liquid that he called the “urine of the Master.” When Adolf Hitler came along, Schwitters’ day in Germany was over. The Führer did not approve. In 1935 Schwitters fled Germany—first to Norway, then to England, where he died in 1948.

If Schwitters failed in his attempt to “remake the world using pieces of the old,” he did participate in a movement that swept away some of the esthetic pretensions of the past, and pioneered in new forms which abstract painters later took up. At the current Venice Biennale, 81 of his works are being exhibited in posthumous tribute. Such richly toned collages as Painting with Stars are formed with striking and harmonious patterns composed with discipline and almost geometric precision. “His collages,” wrote Critic Diego Valeri, “are little miracles—tasteful, sensitive, communicative, and even touching. To the unwary eye, they may seem mere exercises in patience. But to the discriminating onlooker, they turn out to be small but exquisite works of art.”