Revolution from Refuse

"So that one cannot say, 'the poor fellow had no inkling of how important he was,' I know full well that the time will come for me and all the other important personalities of the abstract movement when we will influence an entire generation."

The speaker was German-born Kurt Schwitters; the year, 1931. Seventeen years later, he died in exile in England, all but unknown. As a current retrospective of 163 works in Manhattan's Marlborough-Gerson Gallery shows, he was never a major figure in the abstract movement, but he raised the art of collage from a scissors-and-glue pastime into a serious, if topical, medium that makes him seem fresh again in a season dominated by pop.

Within a Cubistic Grotto. "The waste of the world becomes my art," Schwitters scribbled on the back of one collage. Beginning with his 1919 encounter with the Dada movement, he made art out of stamps, trademarks, slogans, coins, buttons, torn-up photographs and headlines, used for punning or oblique meanings. He hunted bric-a-brac in the streets, even carried a small screwdriver, which he once was caught using to detach a "Rauchen Verboten" sign from the back of a streetcar.

Why this predilection for cast-off and used-up objects? In part, it grew out of the pessimism of postwar Germany. Explained Schwitters: "I could not use what I had brought from the academy. I felt myself freed [from the war] and had to shout my jubilation out to the world. Out of parsimony I took whatever I found to do this, because we were now a poor country." He called this art of shreds and patches Merz, a meaningless word derived from Kommerz (commerce), but carrying with it connotations of both ausmerzen (to reject), Herz (heart), and Schmerz (pain). In the form of rubbish, Schwitters brought elements of reality physically into his art. In his studio in Germany, he also constructed a collage environment--his famed Merzbau. It was sort of a cubistic grotto, cluttered with such objects as the plaster-of-Paris-dipped socks of a fellow artist. The Merzbau was also the prototype of "environments," present-day art works that envelop viewers like architecture--fundamentally collage turned inside out. Schwitters had moved from Dada's mockery to an acceptance of commonplace ephemera as O.K. material for art. Shout Through Refuse. "A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting than are wood, nails, turpentine, oil and fabric." The man who said that is Pop Artist Robert Rauschenberg, but Schwitters would have thoroughly approved. Whether he would have been altogether at home with current pop art excesses is another question. Pop art seems to cock a mocking eye at the present affluent society by enshrining such shibboleths as soup cans and commercial-art cliches. Schwitters' goal was more angry. "One can shout out through refuse," he once wrote. "Merz was like an image of the revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been." But he was ahead of pop art in his imaginative use of materials. One of his last collages, For Kate, uses American comic strips, sent to him by a New York friend. He cut them up and reassembled them under a thin layer of transparent tissue paper. That was 1947--long before the world had heard of Roy Lichtenstein's cartoon paintings, or of "happenings" as living collages, or even of pop itself.

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