Kurt Schwitters

“Everything an artist spits out is art.”

Kurt Schwitters made this remark in 1925 in an attempt to express the fact that Merz should not be regarded as an artistic movement in the traditional sense. Merz was not confined to a single medium, Merz had no boundaries, and above all, Merz was part of life and everyday experience.

The graphic prints shown here are some of Schwitters’ lesser-known works, yet they make this “Merz position” particularly clear in their focus on the everyday, the found and discarded: they are misprints produced at the Molling printing works in Hanover, where Schwitters had his works printed. Under normal circumstances, sheets like these would simply have been thrown away. Schwitters, however, trimmed the misprints to a chosen section, mounted them on card and signed the resulting image. In this way, he turned the misprint into a work of art.

In this work, printed text and graphic signs overlap, including an arrow that appears twice in slightly offset positions. Text and abstract composition are superimposed. Schwitters began this series in 1920 and referred to it as “i”. In the second issue of Merz from 1923, he described his “i art” as follows:

“i is the first letter, i is the simplest letter, i is the most simple-minded letter. I have chosen this letter to denote a special category of artworks whose design appears to be as simple as the most simple-minded letter, i.” 

Schwitters’ “i art” extends from texts and poems through to collages and the “i drawings” shown here. These works can arguably be seen as a form of readymade, a term coined by Marcel Duchamp in the 1910s. Duchamp placed bottle racks or inverted bicycles in the exhibition space and declared these everyday objects, which he altered little or not at all, to be works of art. For the first time, the artistic idea or concept thus became more important than the execution of the artwork itself.