Artist, poet, theorist, sound artist, and composer Kurt Schwitters was affiliated with many of the most important art movements of the early twentieth century, including Expressionism, Dada, De Stijl, Constructivism, and the Bauhaus. But beginning in 1918, the final year of World War I, Schwitters pioneered a wholly unique visual idiom he called Merz, a term he used for the rest of his life to describe the collage and assemblage works he made with scavenged and discarded materials.
Construction for Noble Ladies is one of the largest and most important of Schwitters’s Merz pictures. It was constructed in 1919, a period of intense creative energy and experimentation in German society, which was being remade from top to bottom following wartime defeat, the fall of the monarchy, revolution, and ongoing rampant inflation. The assortment of everyday detritus within the work includes a funnel, a broken carriage wheel, a flattened toy train, and a ticket for shipping a bicycle by rail. The picture’s “noble lady” has been tipped over, her profile visible on the lower right, gazing upward.
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Wall label, 2021.
