Word: privatbank
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...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...
...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 Robert Rauschenberg's "combines" of the 1950s...
...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...
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