Introduction

Consider for a moment that Knud Merrild had no digitally generated interactive video experiences to deal with in his lifetime. How fortunate to have only primitive, time honored materials like paint and collage to work with as an artist.

Looking at the photograph of Merrild led me immediately to wonder what kind of car he drove. Ford? Chevy? Nash? DeSoto? This may be a trivial thought, but I found myself looking for some vague outline of the man's personality. I also envy his living in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 40s with all that it implies. I wonder in what way he was a part of the fabric of this city since his imagery could not be classified as L.A. inspired. I understand he detested the movie business.

As I view his work, I see a distinctly original artist zigging and zagging with idea and form, all the while helping us ponder the chasm between the two. Knud Merrild escaped the boundaries of having a restrictive and established style. Instead, he looked for something beyond it all. He placed himself in a room empty of convention. This made him a searcher. It was the artist himself who said "Only the impossible keeps us alive."
-Ed Ruscha

Knud Merrild: State of Flux

When asked to name a Los Angeles artist with an international reputation, most people accurately reply "David Hockney" or "Ed Ruscha." When pushed a little further, and asked to name a good Los Angeles modern artist prior to 1950, most of those questioned suddenly go blank and are hard pressed to come up with a name. That situation is slowly changing as Knud Merrild (1894-1954) continues to gain recognition. Though he may not be well known today, Merrild was a respected and recognized artist during the period 1925-1955, one of only a handful of artists in Los Angeles to fully explore abstraction, the only one to create assemblages, and the one who invented flux painting. His existence in Los Angeles was known to art world specialists--Walter Arensberg collected his work, as did Man Ray--but Merrild, unpretentious and with deep integrity, cared little for art world clichés, and his work fell below the radar of the conservative Los Angeles art scene of the 1930s and 1940s. Today, his work strikes us as fresh, inventive and full of the best aspects that modernism has to offer: thoughtfulness, simplicity and rigor combined with an openness to the use of new materials. Knud Merrild was an unusual artist in an unexpected place.

Merrild, born in Denmark in 1894, studied art in Copenhagen where he was also a champion swimmer. He left for the New World in 1921, determined to become a modern artist. Arriving in New York, he found work designing decorative objects and posters, but longed to see the vast country that had so intrigued him. Merrild headed west in 1922 in a tin lizzie, arriving in Santa Fe with a letter of introduction to the artist Walter Ufer, through whom Merrild met D.H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, who were then living in Taos. They immediately struck up a friendship, and the Lawrences invited Merrild to spend the winter of 1922-23 with them. Those months spent together were later recalled in Merrild's book, A Poet and Two Painters, a major literary achievement and an important account of the writer published in 1938.

Merrild finally reached Los Angeles in May, 1923, where he was offered, but steadfastly refused, employment as a set decorator by the movie studios. His independent nature led him to find his own way, and he soon began painting and exhibiting locally and nationally. Merrild's art went through several phases, loosely categorized as decorative and Cubist-derived work of the 1920s; surrealist paintings, drawings, collages and constructions of the 1930s; and flux paintings of the 1940s. No matter the style, Merrild was continuously exploring universal energies--the ebb and flow of natural forces, the dynamics of opposites, the confluence of physics and aesthetics. His ultimate invention of flux painting, pouring paint on a moistened canvas while manipulating the canvas, fused the force of gravity with the intention of the artist. (It seems only natural that the physically active Merrild would transform his physical energy into a painting method.) As Merrild himself stated "To place oneself in the realm of Flux affords joy and liberation. Somewhere between life and knowledge, or as D.H. Lawrence says, 'in the tension of opposites all things have their being.'" Merrild's work reflects his belief in the forces of change and chance, a state of flux which was his natural realm.
-Victoria Dailey