A Dada artwork is made to break the rules of art. Art was supposed to be handmade, skilled, beautiful and lasting.
Dada began in neutral Zurich in 1916, among young artists who had fled the war. They blamed the war on Europe's order, art included.
Groups soon formed in New York, Berlin, Cologne and Paris.
Hans Arp dropped torn paper on the floor and glued the pieces where they landed. Others used shop-bought objects, nonsense words or one-night performances.
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How These Were Chosen
I kept a work if it passed one of three tests. It reached a public while Dada was still alive. It took its form or material from a shop, a trade or a printed page.
Or part of its story is still disputed, with its maker, date or fate unsure, or only a replica left.
12. Merzbau, Kurt Schwitters (from around 1923)
A room in a house in Hannover, Germany, has been filled with angular forms of wood and plaster. They are built out from the walls and down from the ceiling. The photographer Wilhelm Redemann took three pictures of this room in 1933.
Kurt Schwitters built it inside his own home, at Waldhausenstrasse 5. He was a Hannover artist known for collages made from discarded paper. He began around 1923.
He called it the Merzbau, which translates roughly as "Merz building." It had no frame and no pedestal. He never declared it finished, and he was still adding to it when he left Germany in 1937.
The work started as columns in his studio and then spread through the building. It reached the balcony, the cellar, a water cistern and the attic. By 1937 it covered eight rooms.
Since it was part of the house, no dealer could have shipped it to a buyer. Schwitters gave it a second name, the Cathedral of Erotic Misery. In a text published in 1930, he said the work took in "everything that has struck me as important or unimportant over the last seven years."
Inside the structures, Schwitters left hollows he called grottoes. Some had themes, such as the Cave of the Sex Murders. Others belonged to friends.
Hans Richter, a German painter and filmmaker, listed holes for Mondrian, Arp, Gabo, Lissitzky, Malevich and Mies van der Rohe, among others. There was also one for Schwitters's wife and one for his son.
Each hole held something personal from that person's life. In his 1965 book Dada: Art and Anti-Art, Richter wrote: "He cut off a lock of my hair and put it in my hole."
Richter's lock of hair is the object I think about most. It means part of the Merzbau was made from the people who came to visit.
Because the work was fixed into the walls, it could not follow its maker into exile. Schwitters's eighteen-year-old son Ernst fled to Norway on December 26, 1936. His father followed on January 2, 1937, and decided not to return.
During an air raid on the night of October 8 to 9, 1943, an incendiary bomb destroyed the house on Waldhausenstrasse. The Merzbau burned with it. What survived were Redemann's photographs and what Schwitters and his visitors had written about it.
The room shown in Hannover today is a copy of the main room only. The Swiss stage designer Peter Bissegger built it between 1981 and 1983, with help from Ernst Schwitters. He worked from Redemann's three photographs of 1933.
The curator Harald Szeemann had commissioned it for the exhibition Der Hang zum Gesamtkunstwerk at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1983. The grottoes were the one part Bissegger could not rebuild. Their contents could not be reproduced, so he filled them with enlargements of the old photographs.
At a Glance
Artist: Kurt Schwitters (German, 1887 to 1948)
Made: From around 1923 to 1937, destroyed in 1943
Medium: Wood, plaster, paint and found objects, built into a house
Where to see it: Reconstruction of the main room (1981 to 1983), Sprengel Museum Hannover
About This Work
How big is the Merzbau reconstruction in Hannover?
The Merzbau reconstruction measures 393 by 580 by 460 centimeters, about 13 by 19 by 15 feet.
Did anyone from MoMA see the original Merzbau?
Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, saw the original Merzbau in 1935, on a visit to Schwitters's house. Schwitters was not there to meet him.
Did Schwitters build another Merzbau?
Yes, Schwitters started several. The one he began in 1937 at Lysaker, in Norway, was destroyed by fire in 1951. In 1947 the Museum of Modern Art gave him a 1,000-dollar fellowship, and he spent it on a new one in a barn near Elterwater, in the English Lake District.
Is there more than one Merzbau reconstruction?
Yes, a second Merzbau copy, built to travel, was made for the exhibition Dada and Constructivism in 1988 and 1989.
11. L'Oeil cacodylate, Francis Picabia (1921)
A single eye is painted in the lower half of a canvas. Around it, dozens of people have written their names, jokes and slogans all over the surface. Photographs, postcards and cut paper are pasted among the words.
Francis Picabia made it in Paris in 1921. He was a French painter and one of the leaders of the Dada group in Paris. His own contribution was small: the eye, the title across the top, his signature and the date.
More than fifty other signatures cover the rest. A painter was supposed to fill his canvas himself, and Picabia handed most of this one to his guests.