After Dada dissipated in Paris, and with many of the German Dadaists absorbed in Constructivism, there would seem little left but recollections of the principals, and fitful outbreaks in far-flung locales when the Dada spirit belatedly penetrated. The Prague appearance of Kurt Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann as “Anti-Dada-Merz” suggested that an afterlife of the movement would involve new alliances and careful repositioning. This was confirmed by Schwitters’ partnership with Hausmann, and it took another turn at the initiative of Theo van Doesburg. The Dutchman, itching to stretch his limbs on the Dada circuit, was keen to figure out how to set I. K. Bonset loose on the world without compromising himself as leader of De Stijl. The first steps were tentative, but consequential.
In the aftermath of the convulsive Düsseldorf congress of so-called progressive artists, van Doesburg organized a follow-up affair in Weimar for late September 1922. To the dismay of some of those in attendance, Tristan Tzara and Hans Arp were the representatives of Dada. What’s more, Tzara was invited to give a lecture on Dada. He complied with all the disarming wit to be expected of this seasoned veteran of the public occasion.
Tzara began his lecture by admitting that being a Dadaist was tantamount to being a leper. He then offered the disarming disclosure: “First to tender his resignation from the Dada movement was myself.” He went on to address the oddity of being invited to appear at this assembly, but professed no intention of explaining Dada. “You explain to me why you exist,” he said, turning the issue back on his audience. He elaborated on his basic point that Dada was inseparable from life itself, promoting diversity and intensity as values intrinsic to life. “What we want now is spontaneity,” he urged. But he also seemed to be making an appeal to the Constructivist orientation when he suggested, “Dada reduces everything to an initial simplicity.” In other contexts he’d used the word idiocy instead of simplicity. It was a theme he prolonged with reference to Buddhist indifference, proof he said that “Dada is not at all modern.”
Tzara saved the best for last. His concluding words make for one of the more inspired moments in the annals of Dada.
Dada is a state of mind. That is why it transforms itself according to races and events. Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing, it is the point where the yes and the no and all the opposites meet, not solemnly in the castles of human philosophies, but very simply at street corners, like dogs and grasshoppers.
Like everything in life, Dada is useless.
Dada is without pretensions, as life should be.
Perhaps you will understand me better when I tell you that Dada is a virgin microbe that penetrates with the insistence of air into all the spaces that reason has not been able to fill with words or conventions.
The Constructivists, staunch advocates for the application of art to the better welfare of society, were confronted here with a vivid reminder of the exigencies of life on earth in the unpretentious encounter of dog and grasshopper, comporting in a realm unsullied by the jargon and pitfalls of human reason. For life’s underlings, it seems, the sole aid was un microbe vierge (a virgin microbe).
Tzara delivered his lecture in French, a language foreign to some in attendance, many of them already having to make do with German as they came from Russia, Hungary, or Holland. Lázló Moholy-Nagy was one of those in the audience who lacked French, and neither he nor El Lissitzky could follow Tzara’s talk. More unsettling was that this Dadaist was there in the first place. Had they known of it, they might have approved Tzara’s view expressed in Dada Almanac: “After the carnage we are left with the hope of a purified humanity.” Moholy-Nagy later recounted how disturbed he and his comrades were to be confronted with Dadaists at a Constructivist affair, complaining about it to van Doesburg, the organizer. But “Doesburg, a powerful personality,” in the words of Moholy-Nagy, “quieted the storm and the guests were accepted to the dismay of the younger, purist members who slowly withdrew and let the congress turn into a dadaist performance.”
A famous photo from the Weimar congress shows the Dadaists front and center, acting up in their sportive way. It’s a priceless window into the tentative alliance between Dada and Constructivism that few saw coming. In the photo the group is arranged in a mock Dada coronation on the steps of Hotel Fürstenhof where the congress was held. Van Doesburg in the center wears a natty tailored suit with white tie and black shirt. He took pride in being up to the minute: “Modern clothing is above all sport-clothing,” he told a friend, just the ticket for “the electric atmosphere” of the big city. He’s made a crown out of the latest issue of De Stijl (reconfigured in a horizontal format when he moved to Weimar, making it feasible to circle his forehead here). His wife, Nelly, extends her hand regally to Tzara, with customary monocle, bending as if to plant a kiss. Another participant blows or whispers something through a rolled up paper extending to Tzara’s ear. At the bottom of the frame Hans Richter is on his back, pinned down by Werner Graeff’s cane on his torso and hand gripping his ankle (Graeff was editorial assistant on Richter’s G 
). Most of the others look amused—Arp with a big grin, happy to have regaled the congress with readings from his Cloud Pump poems; Lissitzky farther back with a pipe in his mouth gazing on the antics with bemused indulgence; and Hungarian writer Alfred Kemény grinning as well. Moholy-Nagy at the rear looks uncomfortable.
Many of the same people had posed for photographs at the Düsseldorf congress in similar sorts of staging. In one, the group is held in place by a ladder arranged horizontally like a harness over their heads—Graeff, Richter, Marcel Janco, Lissitzky, van Doesburg, and Hausmann among them. Schwitters appears in other photos from the Weimar gathering, towering a full head higher than the diminutive Tzara and Lissitzky.
Schwitters had a way of making an entrance. Richter, who hadn’t met him before, was amazed to see the man stride boldly into a room where numerous artists were mingling; without a word he brandished a card with the letter W and began to pronounce, intone, hum, and render it in full phonetic elasticity for five minutes. “I have never seen such a combination of complete lack of inhibition and business sense,” Richter marveled, “of pure, unbridled imagination and advertising talent.” Moholy-Nagy was equally astounded. “He started to recite it slowly with rising voice,” he recalled. “The consonant varied from a whisper to the sound of a wailing siren till at the end he barked with a shockingly loud tone. This was his answer,” Moholy-Nagy realized, to the school of “‘babbling-brook’ poetry.” With his whimsically shrewd way of seizing the day, Schwitters invited several of those in attendance back to Hanover for an impulsively arranged soirée at Garvens Gallery a few days later. First, though, was another Dada presentation in nearby Jena, with van Doesburg nervously giving a talk, Nelly playing piano, and Schwitters getting a rise out of the audience by releasing several dozen mice.
Constructivist Congress in Weimar, 1922.
Hans Richter on the ground;
Tristan Tzara is holding Nelly van Doesburg’s hand;
behind them is Theo van Doesburg with an issue of De Stijl for a hat;
directly above the hat is El Lissitzky, with pipe; Hans Arp is on the right;
László Moholy-Nagy is on the right of the trio in the rear.
Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin.
When Dada went through its terminal convulsions in Paris in 1922, it was presumed to be dead and done for. After all, the original group in Zurich had long since disbanded, Club Dada in Berlin expired after the 1920 Dada Fair, and whatever looked like Dada in New York had not been formally affiliated with the movement. In each case, migrations transmitted the microbe elsewhere. Ernst and Tzara ended up in Paris, along with Duchamp, Picabia, and Man Ray. So if the “Dada movement” collapsed in that regal city, it wasn’t for lack of resources.
It’s fitting, then, that Dada persisted in its purest surrogate in Hanover, in Schwitters’ unstoppable Merz activities. Schwitters developed a rewarding friendship with Hausmann and Hannah Höch, and his sense of mission was reinforced by contacts ranging from Ernst in Cologne to Arp and Sophie Taeuber in Zurich. Schwitters may not have been in Dada, but he was unmistakably of it—and as its spark died off elsewhere, Dada seemed most secure in his fraternal hands. When Moholy-Nagy and Lissitzky came around, relishing his friendship and sheer creative abandon, Merz was like a Mardi Gras mask worn over the countenance of Dada.
Van Doesburg had a hankering to fling Dada like a foul rag in the faces of his fellow Dutchmen, and in the wake of the Weimar congress, it seemed for the first time like a real, practical possibility. The Dada-Merz presentations in Weimar, Jena, and Hanover proved so stimulating to van Doesburg that he set about trying to organize a Dada tour in Holland. Unfortunately Tzara, Ribemont-Dessaignes, Arp, and Hausmann all declined the invitation, but Schwitters was game. And the Theo-Nelly-Kurt trio had already worked up a repertoire of sorts in Jena after the Weimar congress. Van Doesburg’s De Stijl ally, Vilmar Huszár, reminded him of the challenges they would face: “You must prepare the Dadaists for a cool and sober public, so they can really throw abuse to draw them out of their composure.”
Even in Dada hot spots like Paris and Berlin, Dada had been misapprehended by the public, not only because of its own tactics of misinformation, but because coverage in the press was both extensive and ill-informed. Beginning with the deft interventions planted by Tzara and Arp in Swiss newspapers, Dada had capitalized on the bankruptcy of journalism, regarded as an immoral war-mongering enterprise during the late conflict. This meant there were swathes of ignorance throughout Europe, occasionally penetrated by misinformation. By and large, Dada remained a rumored event beyond the horizon.
Holland had been insulated from news of Dada. Even aspiring members of the avant-garde in the Low Countries had only a dim idea of what it was all about. Belgian poet Clément Pansaers wrote Tzara in December 1919 to introduce himself as an adherent of Dada, which he took to be part of le mouvement Apollinaire. He was under the impression that Jean Cocteau and Pierre Albert-Birot were Dadaists—these being two of the names one could never mention in Breton’s company without a sizzling rebuke. Even as late as November 1921, Pansaers published an article describing Dada as “compatible with that which is understood as Symbolism and Cubism,” a characterization as misguided as saying that Dada was a civic league for the protection of public morals.
Pansaers had, however, sniffed out the self-electing aspect of Dada. “I became a Dadaist around 1916, as the word Dada was not yet invented; in the same way that John Rodker became a Dadaist in England during the war and Ezra Pound in America. And as many others became Dadaist, without knowing and without the slightest external influence.” Pansaers shrewdly noted that the Dada impulse might be traced back to Alfred Jarry, founder of pataphysics, the “science of imaginary solutions.” By this point he’d clearly read various Dada tracts, picking up on its general character as a “theory of Destruction” fanning out precariously from “destruction through construction.” At this point Pansaers was understood by fellow Belgian writers as a Dadaist—though Dada itself could be misapprehended as “the supreme pinnacle of the modern poetic sentiment”—and he was publishing poems like “Foxtrot,” with rocking seasick typography, visually suggesting jazz dance trends had something to do with Dada.
In truth, Pansaers was first exposed to Dada in Berlin in 1918 by German writer Carl Einstein, whose children he had tutored the previous year. Einstein was one of the earliest advocates of the intelligibility and artistic virtue of African art and may have drawn Pansaers’ attention to the enthusiasm of Grosz and others for jazz and the “white Negro” aspirations of Club Dada. Pansaers wasted no time publishing a book called Le Pan Pan au Cul du Nu Nègre (The Can-Can on the Ass of the Naked Negro) in 1919. In a trip to Paris the following August, he finally had a chance to meet the Dadaists themselves, who at that point were still in the first flush of their public manifestations. With assurances of their participation, he booked a hall in Brussels for Dada’s Belgian debut, yet was somehow unperturbed when all the participants backed out at the last moment and the event had to be cancelled.
Pansaers’ disillusion with the shenanigans of the Parisians reached a breaking point, though, in April 1921 when he was in Paris for the infamous “affair of the wallet.” Having found a waiter’s wallet in Café Certa (the watering hole immortalized in Aragon’s book Paris Peasant), the Dadaists debated what to do about it. Some argued that Dada, being beyond good and evil in Nietzsche’s sense, obliged them to act against conventional morals and keep the proceeds; others suggested using the purloined funds to finance Dada publications. (Meanwhile, Éluard quietly returned the wallet to the waiter.) After Pansaers reported the incident to Picabia, both men withdrew from the movement. Picabia published Pansaers’ oblique account in La Pilhaou-Thibaou under the title “A Defused Bomb,” with a section named “Accusation and Condemnation” followed by another, “Ragtime Funeral.” This infamous episode was typical of the uncertain grasp these brash French youth had on morality, as they struggled to escape their bourgeois upbringing and clung to Dada as the only available skeleton key.
Pansaers was not the sole agent of Dada in the Low Countries. A group associated with the journal Revue du Feu held a soirée in February 1920 at which some of Schwitters’ Anna Blume poems comprised part of an evening of “ultra-stylistic-dadaist-cubist poetry” (though a reporter didn’t get the name right, spelling it Schnitters). In Antwerp in 1921 a book-length poem called Bezette Stad (Besieged City) appeared, characterized by a reviewer as “a mixture of French Dadaism and Futurism.” Its author, Paul van Ostaijen, was fitfully resigned that the press would “interpret this as Dadaist again,” following a rudimentary reflex to “open the cupboard and find a label.” There was, however, a Dada pedigree, insofar as the book was written in Berlin in the wake of the International Dada Fair in the summer of 1920.
Van Ostaijen was familiar with Berlin Dada and actively disliked Grosz and Mehring (who returned the favor). Bezette Stad is one of the supreme typographic performances—“‘physioplastic’ typography,” Ostaijen called it—of modern book art. Its grim depiction of Antwerp under siege during the war is shot through with a panorama of popular entertainments, which were often associated with Dada, jazz in particular, and van Ostaijen felt he was witnessing a “Dada-jazz revolution” sweep over bankrupt Europe after the war. He wrote a film script cum story called “Bankruptcy Jazz,” clearly alluding to the role played by Die Pleite (Bankruptcy), the journal that featured so many of George Grosz’s withering depictions of moral squalor.
“Bankruptcy Jazz” is set in the milieu of a barely disguised Club Dada. “Cabaret Dada Is the Future,” a headline declares. “Dadaism as real a value as an oil well. Consortium for the exploitation of Dadaism is founded,” van Ostaijen continues, picking up on the Dada Advertising Agency presented in Hausmann’s periodical Der Dada. Invitations to a grand opening are set in a typographical layout one could have seen in Der Dada or any number of other Dada periodicals:
At the opening, pistol shots accompany the jazz band. What ensues is a convulsion of the primal itch incited by jazz, luring students out of a lecture on the music of Wagner as they pour into the streets in a “European exertion to become Negroes.” Meanwhile, the economy is plunged into the spiraling inflation that brought the Weimar Republic to its knees. All is solved when Charlie Chaplin becomes Minister of Commerce, smoking the last cigar of debt-laden public currency, and the populace is revived in a paroxysm: “Dada Saves Europe,” a headline brays. “Bankruptcy Jazz” was not published in van Ostaijen’s lifetime—he died in 1928 at thirty-two, his health ravaged in part by the cocaine habit he’d picked up in Berlin—but the association of Dada with jazz was hardly unique to him.
Nor that of Chaplin: a reader of Huelsenbeck’s Dada Almanac would have been confronted by “A Voice from Holland.” In this open letter the author, Paul Citröen, wrote that Holland was the most unreceptive country in the world to Dada and that the few Dadaists there had to console themselves with cheese and Chaplin films.
Not all the Dutch Dadaists were so deprived. Citröen’s fellow Chaplinist Erwin Blumenfeld was actually a Berliner, having fled to Holland after deserting the German army in 1918, where he married Citröen’s cousin in 1921. Both men knew many of the future Dadaists in prewar Berlin. Blumenfeld relished his first meeting with Grosz in a urinal on Potsdamerplatz in 1915. While relieving himself, Blumenfeld saw a “young dandy” enter the pissoir and promptly “fixed his monocle in his eye and in one fell swoop pissed my profile on the wall so masterfully that I could not but cry out in admiration.” This anatomical extension of Grosz’s draftsmanship won Blumenfeld over. “We became friends,” and their friendship continued in the United States, where Blumenfeld became one of the leading fashion photographers of his day, providing numerous covers for Vogue and other sleek publications. In his youth, though, he was an early master of photomontage, one of which he sent to Tzara with his own face appended to a gauzily attired female nude, proclaiming himself “Bloomfield President Dada-Chaplinist.”
Despite Blumenfeld’s courtship of the Dada impressario in Paris, it would not be Tzara or any of the other original group from Zurich who would serve as ambassadors of the movement in Holland. Rather, it would be the Hanoverian who from the beginning had been intent on fashioning his own brand of Dada: Kurt Schwitters.
In late 1922, pondering van Doesburg’s invitation for a Holland tour, Schwitters wondered what he could actually do, given the linguistic divide. He assumed people would demand his “Anna Blume” poem, assuring van Doesburg he could rattle it off in German, English, and French. Not a stunt, exactly, but then his deadpan demeanor, compounded by one language after another, might plausibly rock the house.
Maybe to hedge his bets, Schwitters’ multilingual recitations of his poem were sometimes accompanied by a mechanical puppet manipulated by Huszár. At a performance in Schwitters’ hometown, the role of puppet was enacted by Hausmann, who—dancer that he was—delighted the audience by assuming different dramatic poses between lights up, while Schwitters intoned his numerical sequences.
There were three performances in The Hague, and all but one of the others nearby. At the first presentation on January 10, 1923, van Doesburg gave a lecture on Dada, in black shirt and white tie. At a prearranged moment he paused for a drink of water. This was the cue for Schwitters, sitting unnoticed in the audience, to commence barking like a dog. The effect was electric. One or two people even fainted. Press coverage noted the “frantic applause and noisy cheers,” while assuming that “dada” meant barking. Strategists that they were, Schwitters and van Doesburg did not reprise the trick, bewildering the audience at the next gig, who, of course, came expecting a canine outburst—getting, instead, Schwitters blowing his nose.
For the most part the programs adhered to the same components. It would begin with van Doesburg on a dark stage, illuminated only by a small table lamp, his white socks and white tie standing out against his otherwise black apparel. His lecture drew largely from a pamphlet he had written called “What Is Dada?” for sale in the lobby, along with the various Anna Blume collections. Reporters often noted the commercial aspect of the tour, finding the prices unseemly in view of Schwitters’ performances in particular. “Imagine a poem, not consisting of sentences or words, but just of letters or even weirder, of numbers!” exclaimed one who clearly thought such rubbish wasn’t worth the price of admission. Another professed guarded admiration for “the unmitigated cynicism with which he carried out his performance.” Schwitters was utterly guileless, however. One indignant audience member called out, “Does it make sense? Is it art?” to which he scrupulously replied, “It makes no sense, but it is art.”
Van Doesburg’s pamphlet, like his lectures, patiently explained that Dada was “the anational expression of the collective life experience of humanity over the last ten years.” That experience seethed with contradictions. Accordingly, “for every ‘yes’ Dada simultaneously sees the ‘no.’ Dada is yes-no: a bird with four legs, a ladder without rungs, a square with no corners. Dada possesses positive and negative in equal measure. To hold the opinion that Dada is only destructive is to misunderstand life, of which Dada is the expression.” Schwitters regaled the audiences with the full range of his performance works, from the number and letter poems to early versions of the Ursonate he’d inaugurated on the Prague tour with Hausmann. Against this backdrop, his recitation of poems by German Romantic Heinrich Heine, accompanied by Nelly playing Chopin, tended to rile the audience. Maybe some felt the classics were being abused, while others clamored for more weirdness. Regardless, howls ensued.
Nelly van Doesburg contributed various musical interludes from contemporary composers catching a headwind from the vogue for jazz, like Igor Stravinsky, Arthur Honegger, and Francis Poulenc. And she adapted an interlude from Erik Satie’s ballet Parade, presenting it as “Ragtime Dada.” The most distinctly Dadaist numbers were by Italian composer Vittorio Rieti: “Wedding March for a Crocodile,” “Military March for Ants,” and “Funeral March for a Little Bird.” Finally, Huszár’s mechanical dancing figure lent a shadow-play dimension to an otherwise literary and musical evening.
On one occasion the audience went over the edge and erupted into pure unbridled Dadaism itself, though clearly some advance preparation was involved. Schwitters recounted the episode (in slightly unsteady English) near the end of his life:
In Utrecht they came on the scene, presented me with a bunch of dry flowers and bloody bones and started to read in our place, but Doesburg threw them into the basement where the music uses to sit, and the whole public did dada, it was as if the dadaistic spirit went over to hundreds of people, who remarked suddenly that they were human beings. Nelly lighted a cigarette and cried to the public, that as the public had become quite dada, we would be now the public. We sat down and regarded our flowers and nice bones.
By “scene” Schwitters means the stage itself—which several men stormed bearing a huge “bouquet” three meters high, consisting of rotting flowers and bones, attached to a wooden support. One of the men commenced to reading from a Bible until van Doesburg (who’d been backstage) intervened, flinging the offender into the orchestra pit (“basement” in Schwitters’ terminology). Although not as large an audience as in the Zurich Kaufleuten Hall in 1918, this was the final outbreak of the Dada St. Vitus dance by paying spectators.
As this episode suggests, van Doesburg brooked no shenanigans from the audience. When the audience got rowdy, he’d halt the proceedings until order was restored, declaring a penalty time-out and lowering the curtain. On several occasions he singled out audience members for reprimand, even physical chastisement. This was in keeping with his temperament, but he could hardly have been ignorant of the propensity for Dada performances to whip an audience into a frenzy, so he was most likely playing the straight man to Schwitters’ goofball.
The performers invariably pointed out that they were not Dadaists. In the inaugural issue of Merz, the first number published to coincide with the tour, Schwitters commented on non-Dadaists spreading the gospel of Dada in Holland. Writing in German with a few Dutch expressions (in italics here) he wrote: “May I introduce us? Watch out, we are Kurt Schwitters, not dada, but MERZ; Theo van Doesburg, not dada, but Stijl; Petro van Doesburg you won’t believe it, but she calls herself dada; and Huszár, not dada, but Stijl.” Taking up the question as to why no actual Dadaists were on the tour, he wrote (again with some Dutch), “Look, that’s the subtlety of our culture, that a Dadaist, precisely because he’s a Dadaist, cannot awaken and artistically clarify the slumbering Dadaism in the audience.” We’re living in the Age of Dada (Dadazeitalter), the new Dada era (Dadaneuzeit), he wrote: a historical epoch like the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. It wasn’t Dadaists who made Dada; the times themselves propitiously excreted Dadaists like lava from a volcano. He went on to explain that he, the van Doesburgs, and Huszár were ideally situated to present Dada because in their search for style they were merely holding a mirror up to the audience to cull its opposite, a pure distillation straight from the age itself—and that was Dada. The points Schwitters made in Merz were repeated almost verbatim for reporters.
A year later Schwitters revisited and elaborated these views for the Polish avant-garde periodical Blok, again insisting he was no Dadaist, “because Dadaism, being only a means, a tool, cannot constitute the being of a person as does, for example, a world view.” He then broached a distinction, using accent marks, between dáda and dadá, mirror images of one another. He assigned the former to “established mindless tradition,” while dadá was the great leveling medium, best experienced during performances like those in Holland “where everybody recognizes their own stupidity.” It was a tool, or weapon, that “will always reappear anew whenever too much stupidity collects itself.”
In the same interview, Schwitters cited the Holland tour’s success as “proof that further colonizing work is necessary” and offered a historical profile of Dada’s continuing development. The “old” Dada, he suggested, dated back to 1918 when the “chronic diarrhea” of Expressionism was all the rage and needed to be opposed. The “new” Dada of 1924 was Constructivism. He didn’t use that term, but his list of exemplars makes the case: Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Richter, and Schwitters himself. If Merz could be regarded as Dada by another name, so too could Constructivism. Curiously—or carelessly?—van Doesburg was omitted from Schwitters’ list.
The Holland tour was avidly followed in the press. Van Doesburg counted eighty-eight articles and numerous invitations for him and Schwitters to publish their views on Dada in their own writings or in interviews—but the point they most often reiterated was that “Dada is the essence of our time.” That strategy made sense, especially in the wake of reports of the barking episode in the first performance. They wanted a crowd expecting novelty, which they could certainly provide, but they also saw themselves on a mission. “Dada is the moral solemnity of our time and prepares the road to the future,” they repeatedly proclaimed as a one-liner.
Odd, really, to think of moral solemnity at the core of Dada, but wasn’t it always that way? Hugo Ball was a man haunted by the pressure of destiny, and in Berlin the putrid atmosphere of military supremacy collapsing into Weimar Republic squalor was more than enough to incense anyone able and willing to see through the puffery. Van Doesburg’s investment in De Stijl as an absolute condition of moral reckoning never wavered, and that commitment is evident in other avant-garde movements. Yes, it was a kind of buffoonery—but consider Shakespeare’s plays, in which it’s the clowns who spell out the truth to heedless royalty. When van Doesburg said in an interview, “One cannot set up a new building before the old one is pulled down,” he was affirming the sobering truth that rotten institutions can only shore up the façade for so long.
After the “Anti-Dada-Merz” tour with Hausmann and the Holland tour, Schwitters’ performance skills were honed to a fine pitch. Asking 400 marks an appearance, he maintained a grueling schedule, traveling throughout Germany and Holland, with forays into Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and France—not to mention monthly performances at home, after which he would let off steam by cranking up the gramophone at home and dancing tangos and rhumbas with any pretty girls who happened to be on hand, while emitting a low masculine growl, as his lifelong friend Kate Steinitz fondly recalled. In a performance at the famous Café les Deux Magots in Paris, he made an impact by smashing a plate, and after the frantic applause, he contritely explained, “It’s an obbligato! It’s written in the text!” The audience demanded an encore, and sure enough, there went another plate. This went on for a half dozen more encores, with a delighted Tzara footing the bill for the damage.
Nothing more emphatically embodied Schwitters’ artistic spirit than his own house in Hanover. Yes, there were the odors of baby and cooking and paste for collages, but select visitors were given a glimpse of the inner (or upper) sanctum of Merz. If you were lucky, you got a private tour, or ended up having a “shrine” devoted to you. It was that personal, yet strangely esoteric. It came to be known as the Merzbau, or Merz-building. An entire floor of the Schwitters’ household was gradually overtaken by a kind of private “installation.”
Artists’ studios have a legacy of glamorous intrigue, generally speaking. It’s where the magic happens. Once photography offered access to these sites, artists like Brancusi and Picasso were careful to arrange their space to make the mystery glow. But Schwitters was a different case. He lived and worked at home, in a domesticated realm where the avant-garde inextricably mingled with bedspreads, cooking utensils, and household pets, like the guinea pigs he cultivated.
An early intimation of the Merzbau was announced in the first issue of Merz: “Experiments are being conducted in secret with white mice that are living in Merz pictures specially constructed for the purpose.” He could’ve gone on gluing urban litter onto his Merz assemblages, but why stop at a rectilinear frame? Why not make a space into which you can wedge yourself, a sensory immersion, like a rodent burrowing into soil?
The Merzbau started innocently enough with a few columns, sculptural assemblages like the Merz paintings. One was a shrine to his first son, with a death mask of the infant’s head. These shrines were freestanding composites, several feet high. In the early stages, it seems, they weren’t destined for a commemorative role. In 1919 and 1920 Richard Huelsenbeck and Ernst visited Schwitters’ studio and noted that these rising conglomerates served mainly as repositories for the refuse Schwitters needed for his Merz pictures—both “respectable and less respectable” items, Huelsenbeck noted.
After the Holland Dada tour, Schwitters set to work in earnest on the space in his home studio, erecting enclosures and expanding the material around these cubbyholes until eventually there were walk-in and walkthrough areas. Ultimately there were at least forty of these grottos, as he called them. “I am building a composition without boundaries,” he explained to Museum of Modern Art director Alfred Barr, “each individual part is at the same time a frame for the neighboring parts.”
By 1930 the Merzbau had become so complex that Schwitters was employing a carpenter, an electrician, and a painter. Friends were pressed into service. He sought Moholy-Nagy’s help in constructing a “White Palace” as housing for his guinea pigs within the expanding structure. His son Ernst got involved as well. He described how the project evolved from the original rudimentary planar form of Merz pictures. His father “started by tying strings to emphasize this interaction. Eventually they became wires, then were replaced with wooden structures which, in turn, were jointed with plaster of Paris. This structure grew and grew and eventually filled several rooms on various floors of our home, resembling a huge abstract grotto.” A key term here is abstract, in that the few surviving photographs reveal intersecting, undecorated planes rising from floor to ceiling. But it wasn’t like that inside, which consisted of grottos, caves, and rooms, though it’s not clear what differentiated them. There was a Biedermeier Room, and a Stijl Room, for instance, but the Nibelungen Hoard sounds more like a cave, and the Luther Corner sounds like none of the above. Clearly, themes were spawned, attaching themselves to structural supports and dedicated zones.
Merzbau, detail from interior of Kurt Schwitters’ house in Hanover. Installation: ca. 393 × 580 × 460 cm. WV-Nr. 1199 (Abb. 19). Inv. KSA 2008, 12.
Photo: Wilhelm Redemann. bpk, Berlin / Sprengel Museum, Hannover, Germany / Wilhelm Redemann / Art Resource, New York. Copyright © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.
As the Merzbau swelled, it was on its way to becoming the uninhibited externalization of Schwitters’ consciousness—even his manifest unconscious. The grottos were devoted to topics or individuals. Schwitters was prone to filching little items from his friends, depositing them as fetishes in the grottos devoted to them. Steinitz and Höch were permitted the rare privilege of assisting in the design of their own grottos, and Höch even had two of her own. Richter forfeited some locks of hair for his grotto, while Taeuber relinquished a bra.
Schwitters purloined a whole sheaf of pencils from Mies van der Rohe’s architectural drafting board. Perhaps some of them went into the Goethe cave, with its clutch of pencils ground down to nubs, suggesting the fertility of the great German poet. There were signature touches like the Monna Hausmann, in which Schwitters superimposed his friend Raoul’s face onto Leonardo’s famous lady, though it also served as homage to the deft touch applied by Duchamp several years earlier.
Given that the original column was called Cathedral of Erotic Misery, a place was reserved for grim subjects from the outset, like the love grotto commemorating a spate of sex murders in Hanover in 1924. This dark side of the Merzbau, along with the fetishistic aura of the grottos, didn’t necessarily tickle the fancy of visitors confronted with objects like the bottle of urine “solemnly displayed so that the rays of light that fell on it turned the liquid into gold,” as Steinitz recalled. Museum director Alexander Dorner was appalled, finding the whole project “a kind of fecal smearing—a sick and sickening relapse into the social irresponsibility of the infant who plays with trash and filth.” Richter, less judgmentally, described it as “like some jungle vegetation, threatening to keep on growing forever.”
The walls and ceilings of the house itself limited the growth, though at one point it broke through an exterior wall to incorporate a balcony and even plunged down below the foundation. But space was limited, so the Merzbau’s expansion eventually meant contraction. Schwitters characterized this aspect of the project as a reflection of the times: “This is an age of abbreviations.” Biographer Werner Schmalenbach put it well. “His real aspiration was toward infinity, but an infinity located, so to speak, inside space.”
In contrast to the discomfort felt by Dorner, such aspirations could elicit a sense of awe, as registered by Arp: “Without parallel in either the ancient or the modern world, this monumental structure by no means suggested the merely odd works of eccentric hobbyists. Quite the contrary: the beauty of its rhythms set it alongside the masterpieces of the Louvre.” Masterpieces? Louvre? Arp was making a point, but he surely knew that Schwitters’ world of rubbish would be unwelcome in the grand sanctuaries of Western art.
The Merzbau’s more plausible connection was with architecture, not art. Schwitters had, in fact, studied architecture at the Technical University in Hanover in 1918, just before he found his way into the adventure of Merz. In April 1919, the same month he issued the founding declaration of the Bauhaus, Gropius published a pamphlet in connection with an exhibition at the Neumann Gallery in Berlin, site of the original Dada event in the city. Addressing artists, he exhorted them to “smash the frames of ‘salon art’ around your paintings; go into the buildings, endow them with fairy tales of color, engrave your ideas onto their naked walls—and build in fantasy, without regard for technical difficulties.”
Schwitters directed the invasion of his home by an overflow of Merz like a film set (think The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) without actors. If there’d been a film, the only motion would have been the occasional peekaboo of a guinea pig. The whitewashed, interpenetrating planes of the edifice obscured the “fecal” interiors, coming to resemble more and more the sleek productions of Schwitters’ friends—the Prouns of Lissitzky and the intermedia explorations of Moholy-Nagy like his Light Reflector, an almost Rube Goldberg contraption that spins and wobbles, while casting delicate geometric shadows on a wall or screen.
In March 1923, Moholy-Nagy was appointed to the Bauhaus as Johannes Itten’s successor. Van Doesburg, having moved to Weimar in hopes of such an appointment for himself, now saw the futility of his aspirations and relocated to Paris. By this point, and for years to come, Schwitters’ circle of friends consisted of these and other Constructivists. The rubbish gathering for Merz productions never ceased, but he began executing planar compositions that resembled something that might’ve come from a factory. He was a fellow worker in a cause, and as in everything he did, he threw himself into it wholeheartedly.
Schwitters’ financial outlook mirrored that of many of his fellow countrymen in Weimar Germany. During a family vacation on the Baltic in 1923 (one of several with the Arps and Höch), Schwitters’ father had to sell some property to afford the return travel cost. There was little chance of making a living from art, though Schwitters did have support from Katherine Dreier, who arranged for a Societé Anonyme show of his work in New York. On a visit to Hanover, she splurged and rented an entire movie theater so Schwitters’ son Ernst could see a Chaplin film, such fare deemed unsuitable for junior viewers in Germany at the time.
Schwitters’ vocations naturally overflowed the recognized boundaries of the arts, and he embraced the Constructivist view that the art impulse could and should be extended to everyday life. So he learned the rudiments of graphic design and in short order was getting civic commissions from the city of Hanover.
In 1927 he founded a league of abstract artists (die abstrakten hannover), holding the first meeting in his house, commemorating the occasion by tossing a recently deceased guinea pig on the hearth fire. Afterward, he ushered one of those in attendance upstairs to the Merzbau, where Rudolf Jahns experienced “a strange, enrapturing feeling” in the absolute silence of “the grotto whirling around me.”
A few months later Schwitters organized an international group of typographers, rings neuer werbgestalter, which included, among others, Moholy-Nagy, Dutchman Piet Zwart, and the Swiss Jan Tschischold, author of the influential manifesto-treatise The New Typography (1928). Tschischold designed Schwitters’ completed Primal Sonata in 1932. The aspiration of the typographic organization was to persuade commercial clients that “an advertisement is only as good as its design.” Products have come and gone, but their ads are perpetuated even today in histories of graphic design.
Schwitters had inaugurated his little magazine for the Holland Dada tour, and while it has legendary associations with Dada, Merz became a vehicle for showcasing Schwitters’ wide-ranging interests and affinities. It was also a practical forum in which he could display his skills as a graphic designer. Merz 11 was a portfolio for the Pelikan company. The first several issues share a design sensibility with van Doesburg’s Mécano—and van Doesburg was a regular contributor.
Merz quickly blossomed as a vehicle in which Merz and Dada poems and artwork merged seamlessly with international Constructivist style. In the fourth issue, Lissitzky’s “Topography of Typography,” with its eight bulleted points, shared a page with a wooden assemblage by Arp. Proclaiming that “the new book demands the new writers. Ink-stand and goose-quill are dead,” Lissitzky forecast, without further comment but in full caps: THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY.
In this same issue, a photogram by Moholy-Nagy, a De Stijl chair by Rietveld and an architectural model by Oud and van Doesburg mingle with a potpourri of Dada “banalities” by Tzara (reported to be “cultivating his vices”), Ribemont-Dessaignes, Hausmann, Arp, and Josephson, as well as an article called “Disclosed Pseudonyms,” a riot of word play and disinformation.
Arthur Segal, represented by a painting in this issue, is given a fictitious pseudonym, and his first name is rendered “8 Uhr”—pronounced, in German, acht-ur, a phonetic meltdown of Arthur. Accompanying a spurious photograph of I. K. Bonset is a caption: “In the battle for Truth and Beauty the editor hastens to inform the public, that the HIGHLY ESTEEMED MISTER THEO VAN DOESBURG has never existed. Derived from the name SODGRUBBE, he is a badly veiled pseudonym for I. K. Bonset (see illustration).” In short, Dada hijinks were alive and thriving in Merz.
Most of the issues were published in 1923–1924, though a few more appeared sporadically into 1932. The double issue number 8/9, from the summer of 1924, was a collaboration with Lissitzky, bearing the title Nasci after the Latin for birth, production, development, though Schwitters initially hoped to call it Isms. This issue, in large format and glossy paper, was a visual portfolio in the vein pioneered by The Book of New Artists Moholy-Nagy edited with fellow Hungarian Lajos Kassák.
Lissitzky’s introduction to Nasci began by lamenting the routinized celebration of machine culture in Constructivist circles, contrasting it with the perpetual disequilibrium of creation: EVERY FORM IS THE FROZEN INSTANTANEOUS PICTURE OF A PROCESS. THUS A WORK IS A STOPPING-PLACE ON THE ROAD OF BECOMING AND NOT THE FIXED GOAL.”
This acknowledges a perhaps unpredictable point of convergence and solidarity between the ecumenical embrace of trash in Merz and Lissitzky’s own Proun works as transitional junctures between pictures and architecture.
The two artists were benefitting from the anti-art purview of Dada, as they embraced the spirit of perpetual exploration in which the individual work, no matter how fully realized, was a Janus-faced entity assimilating the past while looking into the blank slate of the future. Nothing symbolized that blank more than the legendary black canvas of Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich, Lissitzky’s mentor, which filled the better part of a page of Nasci as if it were the gateway to any further creative gambit. In truth, however, Nasci coincided with an endpoint of sorts—for Lissitzky, at least.
During the preparation of Nasci, Lissitzky fell ill and was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis. Schwitters rallied the help of his friend Steinitz, whose husband was a doctor, and the Russian artist was able to travel to a sanitarium in Switzerland. He stopped on the way in Zurich to spend time with Arp, “a downright good, kind fellow,” he wrote. “Absolutely no smell of sharp practice,” he added, sounding a note of potential suspicion that would unfortunately be a premonition of things to come. For the time being, he delighted in Arp’s work, and the two men came up with the idea of mounting an exhibition of “post-cubist” art. Although that never occurred, Lissitzky was able to get going in its place an idea he’d originally proposed to Schwitters, for a book profiling the march of the avant-garde. Schwitters didn’t take the bait, but Arp did.
Once he settled into the sanitarium, though, Lissitzky felt frustrated. He complained he was getting no support or even any news from Arp. He began to suspect his coeditor of being untrustworthy and at the same time cast a suspicious glance at Moholy-Nagy, imagining that with the Hungarian’s new eminence as a Bauhaus master he was trying to change history and make everything look like it culminated in that institution. He was not alone: Moholy-Nagy’s former friend Alfred Keményi accused him of usurping Constructivism for “unauthorized self-propaganda.”
Clearly Lissitzky’s illness was weighing on him, as he even had to probe Taeuber back in Hanover with the query, “How is Kurtschen?”—his nickname for Schwitters—“Is he still offended? Tell him that of all the artists in Germany I like him the best.” Nevertheless, the Russian soldiered on. By the end of the year, Lissitzky was finalizing The Isms of Art, “going marvelously now that I am seeing to the whole thing by myself.” But he bore the grudge of disappointment: “Zurich is spoilt for me now because of Arp.” Communication was still necessary, some of it filtered through Sophie, whom he cautioned not to let Arp know the full extent of his feelings. Lissitzky was even forced to wonder about the source of his animus, admitting “I’m getting worried myself now about my mistrust of people.” Not long after the book was published, early in 1925, he returned to Russia where he spent the rest of his life, with a few return trips to the West to arrange exhibitions.
The falling out between Arp and Lissitzky was not one-sided. Arp felt slighted by his partner’s refusal to acknowledge his historical role in the delicate issue of the square. Odd as it sounds, this rudimentary geometrical figure spread like wildfire through the arts during and after the war, along with claims to priority. Arp thought he and Taeuber had “invented” it around 1915 in Zurich, the date given in fact in a work of his reproduced in The Isms of Art in the section on abstraction. He even considered patenting the square. Nevertheless, he felt enough proprietary interest to fly into a rage when his collaborator, Lissitzky, staked his own claim.
In 1922, Lissitzky published an illustrated book called About Two Squares: A Suprematist Tale dedicated “to all children,” in which a black square and a red square jostled for supremacy in a hyperspace that includes a globe. Lissitzky was dutifully paying simultaneous homage to the nascent revolution and to the formidable Black Square of his mentor Malevich, whose famous painting was executed about the same time as Arp’s and Taeuber’s squares in Zurich. More literally, Lissitzky was mobilizing, in a sequence of book pages, Malevich’s 1915 Suprematist Painting: Black and Red Square. At the 0.10 exhibition in Petersburg in 1915, Malevich’s Black Square had been positioned at the corner of two walls and the ceiling, a site normally consecrated for icons in Russian households.
A black square fills much of the cover of a pamphlet Malevich circulated at the exhibit, From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, in which he boldly declared: “I have transformed myself in the zero of form and have fished myself out of the rubbishy slough of academic art.” Had the Dadaists in the West known of this proclamation, they would likely have embraced it as a slogan.
If competition in Russia was so frantic, one can only imagine the dismay Lissitzky felt when he arrived in Germany a few years later and found the sacred square jostling for position with art of every stripe, even by artists who’d never heard of Malevich. In 1923, Paul Westheim published “Remarks on the Quadrangle at the Bauhaus,” observing the trend swelling into a heady pedagogic fad:
At the Bauhaus one tortures oneself with stylizing squares according to the idea. After three days in Weimar, one has had enough of squares to last a lifetime. Malevich invented the square as early as 1913. What a stroke of luck that he hadn’t put it under patent. The height of the Bauhaus sensibility: the individual square . . . In Jena, the people from ‘Stijl’ are putting on a protest exhibition: they claim to possess the only true squares.
The reference to De Stijl is a reminder that the entire ethos of the Dutch program was predicated on squares and their variants. In 1920 van Doesburg deployed two black squares for the cover of his booklet Classical–Baroque–Modern. It was a belated if emphatic gesture when, in the 1924 Nasci issue of Merz, Schwitters and Lissitzky filled a page with Malevich’s Black Square as if it were a portal to the future. Like every door it had two sides, facing back and into the future at once.
The Isms of Art is an eclectic but fairly accurate profile of movements and trends in modern art from 1914 to 1924. Lissitzky gives himself a two-page spread as creator of Proun, but Arp managed to carve out five pages for Dada, showcasing work by Picabia, Hausmann, Ernst, Arp, Man Ray, Höch, and Taeuber, as well as a separate profile of Merz. Only Cubism and the general category of abstraction garnered more space.
Like The Book of New Artists, The Isms of Art is essentially a picture book with four pages of text at the beginning; the book being trilingual, even these pages don’t amount to much. What’s more, the authors’ grasp of English was shaky, making these entries intriguing to read. Here’s Arp on Dada, spelling preserved from the original:
The dadaïsm has assailed fine-arts. He declared art to be a magic purge gave the clyster to Venus of Milo and allowed “Laocoon & Sons” to absent themselves at last after they had tortured themselves in the millennial fight with the rattlesnake. Dadaïsme has carried affirmation and negation up to nonsense. In order to come to the indifference dadaïsme was distructive.
The “clyster” to which he refers is from the German word Klistier, meaning “enema.”
A few of the other entries in The Isms of Art were quotes by the originators of, or participants in, the various isms. The entire text on Merz, from Schwitters: “All that artist spits is art” (Alles, was ein Künstler spuckt, ist Kunst). Schwitters, like his friend Moholy-Nagy, had an ecumenical outlook and would no more disqualify the abject from eligibility for art than any other material. Once Dada had its say, the way was open for Merz to begin its long mission of baptizing and redeeming the unwashed material plenitude of the entire world.
Schwitters was indifferent to trends and fashions, resenting that “old rubbish from attics and scrap heaps could not be used as material for paintings on an equal footing with pigments manufactured in factories.” His solicitous embrace of such materials as he moved ahead, merzing and barking and cultivating caves and grottos in the Merzbau, sought to remedy this situation. But as the Third Reich grew in force, compliant Aryan artists churned out airbrushed classical nudes, stalwart heroes, and salt-of-the-earth types clad in lederhosen. When the exhibition of official German art opened near the Degenerate Art exhibit in Munich in 1937, it was woefully underattended, while crowds flocked to see the vilified examples of Dada, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism—any ism in fact, for art had consistently transcended itself, ism by ism, for nearly a century by then.
The earliest Dada exhibitions in Zurich had been patently little more than collections of the most recent isms, and Arp in particular would be associated with subsequent isms like Surrealism and abstraction, incompatible though they were. For him, as for many others, it was the privilege of Dada to poach from anything with zest and character, anything that cleansed, delighted, or startled the senses. The spectrum he assembled with Lissitzky for The Isms of Art suggests a vast, ecumenical, cooperative tendency running through all the arts in their advanced mode. The ism-oriented sensibility was consistently international (even his nationalism didn’t stop F. T. Marinetti from spreading Futurism far and wide). Dada, born in a hive of international refugees during the conflagration of belligerent nations, held true to that embrace of artistic sapience crossing all boundaries. With time the boundaries faded, and it would be harder to verify the historical parameters of Dada as it began to take on mythic proportions.