Merz

メルツ / 1919–1948 / Style / Avant-garde

A one-man movement flying as its banner a single word clipped from a bank advertisement, building compositions out of nothing but discards such as tickets, wrapping paper and torn type. Treating rubbish as structural material, and placing typographic fragments abstractly, it settled the vocabulary of collage and magazine design.

Merz — Kurt Schwitters, Merz 50 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain — Kurt Schwitters, Merz 50 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Merz — Kurt Schwitters, Merz 3, 1923 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain — Kurt Schwitters, Merz 3, 1923 — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

Merz — Kurt Schwitters, Merz 3, plate 2, 1923, lithograph — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain — Kurt Schwitters, Merz 3, plate 2, 1923, lithograph — Wikimedia Commons / Public domain

At a glance

Visual cues

Pasted refuse such as tickets and wrappers
Fragments of torn type and numerals
Diagonal axes of construction
The colour of aged paper

Best used for

Collage-driven editorial and zine layouts built from printed ephemera
Craft-minded branding that composes real tickets, stamps and offcuts

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Dictionary entry

Type: Salvaged letterpress fragments—mismatched sizes, partial words, stray numerals
Composition: Tilted constructive axes locking scraps into an abstract armature
Material: Aged tickets, wrappers, stamps and torn print, glued with visible edges
Caution: Picking images of junk from a stock library erases the history the found object carries and leaves applied grunge. Fragments are not nostalgic decoration, they must hold the axes of the composition.
Further study: The page layouts of the magazine Merz / The space of the Merzbau / The collaborations with Constructivism

Related entries

Dada (ダダ)Same Avant-garde lineage.Compare Merz and Dada
The New Typography (ニュー・タイポグラフィ)Shared effects: Technique.Compare Merz and The New Typography

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