top of page
Kurt Schwitters collages that use chance in composing - specifically Merz 3, 1923 print portfolio is interesting in relation to Photoshop actions. Also the collages are just so beautiful! Have so many blurry pics through glass of these from when I'd see them at MoMA.
Here's the whole portfolio - https://www.moma.org/collection/works/portfolios/71545
Kurt Schwitters, Plate 5 from Merz 3, 1923
Kurt Schwitters, Plate 1 from Merz 3, 1923
From MoMA Website:
According to Schwitters, his collage-based art form called _Merz “_denotes essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes.” Merz fused found materials—from paper scraps to fragments of overheard conversations—into art forms ranging from poetry to assemblage. Between 1923 and 1932, Schwitters sporadically published twenty–two issues of Merz; the third issue comprises a portfolio of six unbound lithographs. The grids of squares and rectangles that appear in various scales, shades, and patterns throughout these prints are layered with colorful fragments from advertisements and children’s books—additions that reflect the fragmented social, political, and economic realities of postwar Germany. The prints are detailed with large capital letters, human and doll–like figures, and a duplicated kitten. This layering of commercial ephemera, hand–drawn imagery, and collage demonstrates how Schwitters applied chance and improvisation to his printmaking process and exposes the additive nature of printmaking.
Jean (Hans) Arp, Untitled (Collage with Squares Arranged according to the Law of Chance), 1916–17
from the MoMA Article:
Jean Arp and other Dada artists embraced chance as a tool for liberating creativity from rational thought. An account by his friend and fellow artist Hans Richter describes how Arp made “chance collages” like this one. Apparently frustrated with a drawing he had been working on for some time, Arp “[. . .] finally tore it up, and let the pieces flutter to the floor of his studio [. . . .] Some time later he happened to notice these same scraps of paper as they lay on the floor, and was struck by the pattern they formed. It had all the expressive power that he had tried in vain to achieve. How meaningful! How telling! Chance movements of his hand and of the fluttering scraps of paper had achieved what all his efforts had failed to achieve, namely expression. He accepted this challenge from chance as a decision of fate and carefully pasted the scraps down in the pattern which chance had determined.1 To remove his own artistic intervention even further, Arp sometimes used a paper cutter to cut the squares rather than tearing them by hand. While chance was undoubtedly the point of departure for this and other works in the series According to the Laws of Chance, the relatively ordered appearance of Arp’s collages suggest he did not fully relinquish control.
bottom of page