Kurt Schwitters Merz Collage: Found Paper Turned into Art

Kurt Schwitters’ Merz collage turned the rubbish of a city into art. From late 1918, in Hanover, Schwitters glued tram tickets, sweet wrappers, labels, scraps of newspaper and bits of wood onto boards and canvas, and gave the whole enterprise a name of its own: Merz. His collages are small, dense and full of worn, creased, printed paper. For anyone who works with crumpled paper, they are a lesson in how much a used scrap can say.

From Hanover to Merz

Wikipedia gives Schwitters’ birth as 20 June 1887 in Hanover. He studied at the Dresden Academy from 1909 to 1915 and began as a post-impressionist and then expressionist painter. Late in the First World War he worked as a draughtsman in a factory near Hanover, an experience he later said shaped his interest in machines.

In 1918 he exhibited at Herwarth Walden’s Berlin gallery Der Sturm and met members of the Berlin avant-garde, including Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and Jean Arp. His first abstract collages appeared in late 1918. In one of them, Das Merzbild, completed in the winter of 1918-19, a fragment of the printed name “Commerz und Privatbank” was cut down to the four letters MERZ. Schwitters adopted the word for everything he made. His first one-man show at Der Sturm followed in June 1919.

Schwitters later explained Merz as a response to the collapse he saw around him: everything had broken down, he wrote, and new things had to be made out of the fragments.

What went into a Merz collage

Tate’s glossary describes Merz as Schwitters’ name for his collages and constructions made from found materials. Wikipedia lists bus tickets, old wire and fragments of newsprint among them. The scraps were not random decoration. Wikipedia notes that many make witty allusions to current events, and that autobiographical elements are common: tickets from journeys, packaging from his daily life.

Look closely at a Merz collage in a museum and you see paper that has been used: folded in a pocket, stained, torn along old creases. Schwitters arranged these pieces with great care, balancing colour, typography and texture, often in tight overlapping layers. The craft is precise even though the materials are humble.

Dada, Merz and beyond collage

Schwitters is usually grouped with Dada, but his relationship with the Berlin Dadaists was uneasy, and Wikipedia argues that the old story of his being rejected by them is doubtful. His work had more in common with Zurich Dada and with Arp. During the 1920s Merz expanded:

• The magazine Merz (1923-1932), each issue devoted to one theme; the last printed his sound poem in full.
• The Ursonate, a long sound poem developed from 1922 to 1932 and first performed in 1925.
• Typography and advertising. Schwitters ran an advertising agency and was official typographer for Hanover council from 1929 to 1934.
• The Merzbau. From about 1923 he began transforming rooms of his family house into a grotto-like sculptural environment; the first room was finished in 1933.

Exile

Under the Nazis Schwitters’ work was shown in the Degenerate Art exhibitions. On 2 January 1937, wanted for questioning by the Gestapo, he fled to Norway, where he began a second Merzbau near Oslo. When Germany invaded Norway in 1940 he escaped to Scotland, was interned as an enemy alien and spent more than a year in Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man, where internees improvised art materials from whatever they could find. Wikipedia records that his Hanover Merzbau was destroyed by Allied bombing in October 1943.

In 1945 he moved to Ambleside in the Lake District. In 1947 he started a last Merzbau in a barn at Cylinders Farm, Elterwater. He died on 8 January 1948, before it was finished. One decorated wall of the Merz Barn was later moved to the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle.

Merz and froissage

Merz and froissage start from opposite ends. Froissage creates its texture deliberately, by crumpling a clean sheet. Merz collects paper that has already been creased, printed and worn by use. Both rely on the same truth: a sheet of paper keeps a record of what has happened to it, and that record can be beautiful. A crumpled froissage drawing cut up and glued among found scraps sits very naturally in a Merz-style collage.

Schwitters also shows that ordinary materials deserve careful composition. His collages are not careless heaps; each fragment is placed. That is a useful counterweight to the chance techniques on this site, where the risk is to accept every accident. For artists who used chance more strictly, see chance in art and Ellsworth Kelly’s chance collages.

Make a Merz-style found-paper collage

1. Collect a week of paper: tickets, receipts, envelopes, wrappers, labels, newspaper. Keep the creased and worn pieces.
2. Add two or three offcuts from your own froissage sheets (see how to do froissage).
3. Choose a small board or card, about postcard size; Schwitters often worked small.
4. Arrange the pieces in overlapping layers, letting printed letters and creases cross each other. Move things until the balance feels right before gluing.
5. Glue with PVA, press under a book, and add nothing else.

To age new paper so it sits well beside found scraps, see how to make paper look old. For more cut-and-paste ideas, see froissage collage.

Seeing Schwitters’ work

Tate holds works by Schwitters, and its artist page links to them. The Sprengel Museum in Hanover has a large collection and a reconstruction of the first room of the Merzbau. Schwitters died in 1948, so his works are now in the public domain in many countries, but museum photographs can carry their own terms of use; check before reusing any image.