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Merz experiments were the origin of a new type
of beauty.
Your poems popularised the concept all over
Germany.
It's true, they enabled me to reach a far wider
audience than art lovers alone. It became my crusade
and my life philosophy. I wasn't afraid of appearing
Narcissistic in being the only Merz artist; Malevich did
just the same thing with his Suprematism!
And why the name?
I was at home, lying on my bed. There was a
Kommerz bank in the building opposite. From my
window, I could just see part of the sign: "merz"
(impish). I'm pretty altruistic, you see: that way I
spare any future art historian from having to delve
into the subject!
Your work contains a great many political allusions.
I'm not a polemicist. Nor am I a satirist, like Grosz or
Heartfield. The artist should be a spiritual guide,
and make sacrifices for others. That's a fairly
Romantic vision of it all, I agree, but it's a long way
from the bourgeois, materialistic dialectics of Huelsenbeck
[Swiss artist and writer, and a Dada theorist
- Ed.]. Don't forget, I'm a painter. And so my
artistic concerns are very real. If Dada had a certain
importance in the history of art, mainly as the antechamber
to Surrealism, you can't say that it was a
visual revolution of the first order: the idea, the
word, the rhetoric - yes; the visual, the pictorial -
not enough.
HD