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| Kurt Schwitters Merz 1925 1. (Relief in the Blue Square) 1925 assemblage and oil on panel Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Kurt Schwitters Merzbild Kijkduin 1923 assemblage and oil on cardboard Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Kurt Schwitters Entrance Ticket (Mz 456) 1922 collage on paper Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid |
"Abstractions have reached the level of facticity. Financial markets, national sovereignty, the corporation as individual under the law, international airspace, property rights: all are interwoven, ephemeral constellations that delineate the rights of the citizen subject, the conditions of the social contract, and the character of lived 'reality'. ... The modernist transformation from the tangible to the intangible, from the object to the image, the haptic to the visual, is only half the contemporary equation. With the passing of the last century and a half, these abstractions have been naturalized, entrenched and built upon to such a degree that they have the quality of concreteness and stability. It makes no sense to claim that either is more 'real' or 'fictional' than the other. These have always been false oppositions; the actual circumstance is far less discrete. After all, the solidity of objects is as much an abstraction of the social systems that produced them as the social systems are abstractions of these objects: the cumulative effect of both is a kind of capitalist realism."
– Walead Beshty quoted in Chance, published in the series, Documents of Contemporary Art by MIT Press in 2010
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| Oskar Schlemmer Formation Tri-partition 1926 watercolor Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Emil Nolde Autumn Evening 1924 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Otto Müller Two nudes in landscape ca. 1922 oil on burlap Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Karl Hubbuch Twice Hilda II ca. 1929 oil on canvas mounted on masonite Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Christian Schad Portrait of Dr Haustein 1928 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Chrsitian Schad Maria and Annunziata 'from the Harbour' 1923 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Max Ernst Untitled Dada ca. 1922-23 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Max Ernst Flower-Shell 1927 oil on canvas with grattage Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Gabriele Münter Murnau in May 1924 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Madrid |
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| Rudolf Schlichter Portrait of an Oriental Journalist ca. 1923-24 oil on canvas Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
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| Otto Dix Portrait of Hugo Erfurth with Dog 1926 tempera & oil on panel Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid |
I am grateful to Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza for the excellent reproductions.