Word: merzbau
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There are 688 works, ranging from Deco vases to documentary photos, from tiny collages to a reconstruction of Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau, from architectural drawings to a De Havilland biplane and a huge, sleek Type 41 Bugatti Royale, the ultimate dream machine of the 1920s, with sharkskin-inlaid running boards and a 12.7-liter engine, one of only six that were built before the Depression put an end to such automotive fantasies. Even the school kids, who race through the rooms of painting and sculpture, fall into an awed hush in front of this one, as their ancestors were once supposed...
...Modern Art has dedicated to his work this summer (through Oct. 1) cannot by nature give much idea of Schwitters' larger ambitions. The projects that vented them either were not begun or were destroyed, like the house in Hanover that he transformed into an immense continuous construction, the Merzbau. The show's catalog, written by its curator, John Elderfield of MOMA, far surpasses in lucidity and thoroughness anything else on Schwitters and becomes the authoritative work on the artist. It evokes in brilliant detail the aggressive and sadistic side of Schwitters' lost oeuvre, which was grandiose and trashy but done...
Twentieth century art has been rich in didactic rooms, in which an artist set forth to construct an exemplary environment: Lissitzky's Proun Room, Van Doesburg's project for a university hall, Schwitters' Merzbau, Kandinsky's music room, and so on. Nevelson's palace is of their company. Yet its motives are not didactic; they are closer to folk art, to the "ideal palace" made from junk by the French postman Cheval from 1879 to 1912, or the Watts Towers built by Simon Rodia in Los Angeles. Collection, repetition, unification: these are the elements...
Schwitters worked on the Merzbau for 18 years, and it was still unfinished when he was forced into exile in 1937. It must have been the most fabulously complex plastic work of the 20th century, a sculptural Finnegans Wake; some intimation of its scope may be had from one detail that Schwitters called The Cathedral of Erotic Misery. This was a column some twelve feet high and six feet wide, with compartments bearing such names as "The 10% War Invalid," "Ruhr District," "Goethe's Grotto" and "Sex-Murders Cavern." They enshrined, among other relics, a tattered stocking, which Schwitters...
Schwitters was making a microcosm of Germany from its own waste products, and there was a bleakly ironical fate in store for the Merzbau: in 1943, an Allied bomb blew it to dust. But its implications, like the legacy of the rest of his work, could not be destroyed. "I know," Schwitters wrote, "that I am an important factor in the development of art and shall forever remain...