A Visual Poem Even

Lee C. Bollinger, President of Columbia University (left), presents the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism, in print or online or both, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000) to Holland Cotter of The New York Times.

Kurt Schwitters made no categorical distinctions between his art (painting, collage, sculpture, design, installation), his writing (poetry, essays, children’s stories) and his performances. To him they were all integral parts of a one-man cultural movement.



These collages have an ambiguous dynamic: they’re festive, but they’re not benign. Thought of in terms of sound, they could be fireworks or gunfire.


Hanover Merzbau - Even the immaculate-white Hanover Merzbau, in a much-traveled full-scale reconstruction from the 1980s by the stage designer Peter Bissegger, feels claustrophobic and tomblike. To Schwitters this precursor of contemporary installation art was Merz in excelsis, a fit container for everything he cared about. But it isn’t an opening-out, heart-gladdening utopian space. It’s the equivalent of a Joseph Cornell box: a repository for relics, secrets and occult signs, a personal theater, and a retreat.

Even in his own time Kurt Schwitters was hard to get to know. He made contradictory impressions on people who encountered him. To those who knew him through his performances he was an extrovert: a large, hammy guy with big ideas and a big voice, relishing the role of clown. But he could quickly drop into loner mode, shy away from company, rebuff unsought friendship, assert the middle-class proprieties he grew up with. After bouts of what seemed like compulsive extroversion, he spent long stretches on his own. And the dozens of collages and assemblages at Princeton suggest how he used that time. Meticulously puzzled together from paper, fabric, wire, scrap wood and other everyday materials, these pieces are the work of a sorter and measurer, a concentrator, a tabletop worker, someone who found satisfaction — more than that, comfort — in up-close, fine-grained aesthetic control. Even when hermetic and melancholic, as many of them are, the collages are a delight, transcending the number-crunching, language-mangling modern world they reflect. And when they’re joyous, they have a true in-love-with-life lift, with hints of nature blooming through. - HOLLAND COTTER NY Times

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/arts/design/kurt-schwitters-exhibition-at-princeton-museum-review.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28