Beverly Hills

The legendary quality of works by Kurt Schwitters is reinforced by the fact that they are so rarely seen. A group of collages and works on paper from the estate of a New York collector reintroduces the throwaway charm of the wittily fanciful Hanoverian.

His “Merz” collages (the word was his own coinage for the everyday rejects--ticket stubs, labels, envelopes, bits of fabric--that he reclaimed in punning new ways) take on various guises. “Dame, Merz 705” is a photograph of a woman torn in two to detach her plumed wedding-cake hat. In “Anna Blume” of 1922, a delighted Schwitters reveled in the palindrome of the lady’s given name (“You are from the rear as you are from the front,” he wrote in a poem-paean) and spattered it all over a montage of purple rubber-stamped messages.

The high spirits and Constructivist-influenced fascination with design and typography that percolate through these jaunty little works are very much of the era. Collages from the late ‘40s offer more restrained, seemingly School of Paris-influenced groupings of colors and textures. The labels are now from English products (Schwitters lived in England after prewar years in Norway) but the artist’s ineffable sense of how “found” words and images can coexist happily and quirkily together remained altogether intact. (Louis Newman Galleries, 322 N. Beverly Drive, to July 31.)