The "Merz Drawings", along with the "Merz Pictures", as Kurt Schwitters calls his Dada collages created from 1918 onward, are considered the artist's most important and best-known work groups. After World War I, Schwitters began to liberate himself and his art from the shackles of academic art and art historical traditions. For Schwitters, “Merz” was not only the name for the artistic style of his one-man art movement, but rather synonymous with artistic revolution and new beginnings. In his "Merz" works, Schwitters transgressed the boundaries between genres, combining various materials, newspaper clippings, tickets, and other found objects, he created new, inaccessible references, and this way transformed himself from an introverted artist into an experimental one with an inexhaustible creative output. Schwitters also gives expression to his progressive productivity as a poet, writer, and architect, creating a provocative and impressive total work of art. His internationally most sought-after creations include the "Merzzeichnungen". The present early collage "Mz 122," in which Schwitters combined a wide variety of typographic items in a seemingly random arrangement to create a new aesthetic impression, is a characteristic work in which all aspects of his artistic departure are united in a compressed format. It is a fine little testimony to this significant chapter of Modernism. After Kandisnky and the Constructivists had overcome the object and invented abstract painting in the early 1910s, Schwitters went one decisive step further shortly thereafter. In his famous "Merzzeichnungen", he even succeeded in banishing all artistic flow. [JS]