Concrete Art

     In 1909 the Russian painter Rossiné came to see me in Switzerland
and showed me drawings in which he had represented his inner world with
colored dots and curves in a way that had never been seen before.  These
were no abstractions of landscapes, people, objects, as in cubist pictures.
I showed him canvases covered with a black web, a network of strange writing,
runes, lines, spots, produced in months of painful work.  My colleagues had
shaken their heads and evaluated my work as unsuccessful sketches.  Rossiné,
however, was impressed.  His work and mine, I think, were concrete art.  The
earliest of my concrete pictures now extant were done in 1915.  Two of these
are in the collection of M. Hagenbach in Basel.  A similar work is reproduced
in the little anthology, Cabaret Voltaire, which appeared in 1916.  These
works are collages of various materials, paper, cloth, string, stone, wood.

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