The collages of Kurt Schwitters—layered arrays of newsprint, packaging labels, advertisement fragments, train schedules, ticket stubs, envelopes, receipts, and even candy wrappers, all tacked down and anchored by expressionist paint—are surprisingly prescient for the postwar period, even proleptic. Although produced between 1918 and 1947, they nonetheless register a communications environment familiar to the second half of the twentieth century; their readymade accumulations of word and image suggest a relentless media barrage and advertising assault, a constant flow of data and information. Schwitters called these collage works “Merz”—a neologism he coined from the second syllable of the German word Kommerz, or commerce—to explain their reflection of and intervention into the logic of capitalist exchange. As the story goes, the artist first cut the nonsense word out of an advertisement for the “KOMMERZ- UND PRIVATBANK” and glued it upon a now lost collage. For Schwitters, this Merz label became an ironic “brand name” for a practice that aimed to collapse consumer and media culture into a total work of art.

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, the first solo retrospective of Schwitters’s work in the United States in twenty-five years, makes a compelling case for the artist’s continued relevance. Originated at the Menil Collection in Houston and curated by Isabel Schulz, executive director of the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung and curator of the Kurt Schwitters Archiv at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, the show includes assemblages, reliefs, sculptures, collages, and even a reconstruction of Schwitters’s famed Merzbau—an immersive environment of accumulated refuse, sculptural projections, and spatial constructions that was originally destroyed by bombing in 1943. Above all, the exhibition emphasizes the Merz collages Schwitters produced between 1920 and 1940, striking works that need to be seen in person to fully appreciate their detail. As installed at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the exhibition was impressive: articulate and informative wall text enlivened the show without leading viewers too much; groups of related works hung on walls in well-selected, even collage-like formations; and the collages themselves functioned like puzzles or coded messages, inviting viewers to decipher them through extended close encounters. Moreover, the accompanying catalogue makes an important contribution to the scholarly literature, with essays by Schulz, Leah Dickerman, and Gwendolen Webster, a carefully researched timeline by Clare Elliott, and many high-quality color reproductions. The project re-imagines and re-animates an artist who has otherwise remained somewhat marginalized in the historiography of Dada.

Together, both exhibition and catalogue present Schwitters as media artist, recovering his critical interrogation of mass communications in the prewar period; but they do so in part to indicate his lasting influence upon a postwar generation of U.S. artists. Viewed through the lens of his posthumous reception, Schwitters comes into focus as an unlikely progenitor for the assemblage practice of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, among others. In fact, the exhibition presents this argument in no uncertain terms: Schwitters “strongly influenced a generation of post-World War II artists,” explains the show’s opening wall text. Johns actually loaned two Schwitters collages from his personal collection to the exhibition—a detail the catalogue’s introduction highlights (8–9). The catalogue even dedicates the show to none other than Walter Hopps, an early champion of Pop art, for the curator’s “engagement of Schwitters in America” (9). Hopps presented a pioneering retrospective of Schwitters’s work at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1962. All of this temporal and locational repositioning begs the salient question: Where do we locate Schwitters in art-historical time and space? Schwitters died in 1948, never visited the United States, and gained fame as the singular spokesperson behind Hanover Dada—so can we actually find his afterlife in the “neo-Dada” of postwar U.S. art? Succinctly put: Is Schwitters best understood as preface to and even part of the neo-avant-garde?

This provocative question propels the catalogue essays by Dickerman and Schulz. It is telling that Dickerman opens her essay with the words of critic Leo Steinberg, who first articulated his notion of the “flatbed picture plane” in a lecture delivered at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1968; this concept eventually informed his famous essay “Other Criteria” (Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972). In his MoMA lecture, quoted by Dickerman in her catalogue essay, Steinberg describes how contemporary art in the 1950s shifted from a vertical orientation to a horizontal one; works by Rauschenberg and Johns functioned as flat surfaces “on which data is entered, on which information may be received,” like screens for the signals and transmissions of the contemporary mediascape (87). But Steinberg, like Rosalind Krauss and, more recently, Branden Joseph, downplays Schwitters’s role in the formation of the flatbed format, ignoring his possible impact on its emergence (Dickerman refers specifically to the way Schwitters is deemphasized in Rosalind Krauss, “Rauschenberg and the Materialized Image,” Artforum 13, no. 4 [December 1974]: 36–43; and in Branden W. Joseph, Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). This scholarly “blind spot” drives Dickerman’s investigation, and she offers a careful and important meditation on how Schwitters employed mechanical reproduction and an experimental print practice to interrogate the reigning media paradigms of his day—a practice that anticipates but notably predates the more closely documented investigations of the flatbed picture plane in the postwar period (88). On the other hand, in her catalogue essay Schulz traces Schwitters’s painterly rather than mediatized approach to collage. She argues that color dictated Schwitters’s compositions and explains how the artist unified heterogeneous material through applications of colored paint. But again, this process was prologue to a later generation. Rauschenberg’s combine paintings, with their incorporation of diverse material bound through colored pigment, “would be unthinkable were it not for Schwitters” (54).

This attempt to recuperate Schwitters as “one of the ‘father figures’ for the generation of the avant-garde after the Second World War” risks a certain causal determinism (7). It is too easy to start seeing Rauschenberg and Johns in every scrap of torn newsprint and frenzied brushstroke of a Schwitters collage. Bestowing an art-historical pedigree, if one of future influence rather than past lineage, undoubtedly provides art-historical validation and legitimation and has the propensity to bias interpretation of Schwitters’s practice by preventing us from seeing his work on its own terms.

And yet, it also allows us to view his practice within larger paradigms articulated decades later by other artists. This premise encourages us to recover the critical valences of Schwitters’s work through its media interventions. Indeed, many of the collages openly invite provocative readings of their charged elements. For example, a work titled Anemone and dated 1947 encodes the militarization and bureaucracy of modern capitalism in its bits of detritus: a food ration card, a worker’s punched timesheet, and a ticket stub detailing “the Regulations of the Company” in finely printed legalese all serve as referential links to an emergent control society. But Schwitters frames these indexical traces of organization and administration with the aesthetics of spontaneity—expressionist brushwork and a seemingly random, haphazard composition. He inverts the fragments’ content through the formal disarray of the work’s surface.

Alternatively, a work like Mz 601, dated 1923, employs a forced order that closely reflects the graph paper embedded in its surface; its diverse materials adhere to a strict linearity and rigid structure. But such formal control belies the work’s tongue-in-cheek subversion of artistic autonomy. The collage prominently displays an entry ticket for an exhibition of Eduard Manet’s painting Le Bon Bock (1873)—with an admission fee of five francs—at its top edge. Paired with a typed fragment serving as Schwitters’s “signature” at lower left, this element functions to unmask if not openly mock the aura of originality by mediating the work of art through mechanical reproduction and commodity fetishism.

The point is that these collages are motivated in intriguing ways. While Schwitters employs aesthetic strategies that are hardly political in any overt sense and always ambiguous—he seems to neither negate text and image nor affirm the free play of the signifier—they nonetheless suggest the artist’s anxieties about modernization and his evaluation of capitalism through its varied debris.

Such works also disclose the dialectical tension between free play and controlled precision, between heterogeneity and order. The exhibition and catalogue thus unwittingly rehearse a debate over spontaneity that has also marked the reception of Rauschenberg and Johns. One wall text explains how Alfred J. Barr celebrated Schwitters precisely for the artist’s apparent embrace of chance procedures. The wall text quotes a 1936 MoMA exhibition catalogue titled “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism”: specific elements in Schwitters’s collages reflect “total spontaneity” and “an ineluctable acceptance of hazard,” according to Barr. And yet, in many of these works, Schwitters actually deploys the aleatory with extreme control and to very specific ends. His collages are not simple statements of spontaneity.

Perhaps the most puzzling and evocative of Schwitters’s Merz works is the Merzbau. Webster’s catalogue essay provides a very helpful and detailed account of the work’s strange genesis and multiple iterations. But the reconstructed version on display in Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, completed by set designer Peter Bissegger in 1983, only provokes yet more questions of historical reception. There is something uncanny and even thrilling about entering a work previously experienced only in grainy black-and-white photographs. But this Merzbau also reads less as art-historical reconstruction than trompe l’oeil imitation. After a gallery attendant instructed me to get out of its alcoves, lest I interact too much with the piece, it seemed clear that the work was more a sanitized, or maybe anesthetized, simulacrum of the original.

This is, of course, to the point of the exhibition’s interrogation of art history’s temporal and spatial complexities. The exhibition and catalogue both suggest the ever-continuing process of art-historical reception; meanings are always constructed ex post facto in the present and relayed back on works from the past. Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage uncovers the recursive logic of art history, the way in which artists come into view through repetitions and re-articulations, through cyclical movements and new prerogatives. We might term this the “Schwitters Effect,” for it mirrors the way Marcel Duchamp emerged through his postwar reception (for more on this dynamic, see The Duchamp Effect, Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon, eds., Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996). In identifying such a historiographic dynamic, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage demands renewed critical investigation of an artist and a media practice that remain surprisingly timely.