Word: merz
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...somehow failed to reach modern man. The Dadaists sought new modes of expression that would make art relevant to life. Taking this idea literally, they introduced everyday objects and materials into art. Duchamp created "readymade" sculptures using old urinals, bicycles and other assorted junk. Kurt Schwitters invented the term "merz" for his art, defined as a "fusion of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes." Collage and photomontage became chief modes of expression...
...provocateur could only work within a relatively innocent art world, which New York had in the '50s-innocent not only about modern art, but to some degree about its history. It took more than a decade before the relationship of his big combines to Kurt Schwitters' tiny Merz pictures and to the formality of cubist collage could be talked about without heat and seen, not as proof of derivativeness, but as simply part of his work's ecology. Besides, the '50s were the last time a public could be provoked by art. (Since then, an overload...
...origins. He rummaged through the trash cans of his native Hannover the way an archaeologist might pick over a buried midden heap, on the sound theory that a culture reveals itself in what it throws away. Schwitters was the first to make poetry of this fact, calling his collages "Merz-pictures." The word came from a fragment of paper he had glued on a collage of 1919 that originally read "Kommerz Und Privatbank," but only the four letters Merz remained visible...
...Schwitters was also possessed by that Faustian drive that today can be seen in Claes Oldenburg: the ambition to turn the whole world, bit by bit, into an immense objet trouvé. Thus his radical invention of environmental art. Schwitters' Merzbau (or Merz-house) in Hannover was the first great work of its kind, integrating assemblage, painting and architecture. Its convolutions reached through two floors and four rooms of Schwitters' home, with a separate offshoot in the attic. It was as if he had deposited the cells and memories of his own brain, wrought out in a coral...
Collage, for example, was originally developed by the cubists; yet when the German Dadaist Kurt Schwitters began to build his many-splendored "Merz pictures" from old newspaper scraps, driftwood, buttons and other attic rubbish, his works took on a pathos and intimacy that more formal cubist compositions lacked. Schwitters himself always insisted that Merz was a nonsense syllable, derived from a phrase from an advertisement for the "Kommerz und Privatbank." But merzen is also an obsolete German verb connoting rejection. Both as nonsense and as nostalgia, Schwitters' handsome, 5-ft. by 4-ft. Merz Picture with Rainbow clearly foreshadows...