Kurt Schwitters

Ernst Schwitters, Lysaker (the artist's son, acquired in 1948)
Lord's Gallery, London
Philippe Dotremont, Brussels (acquired in 1961)
New Gallery, New York
B.C. Holland Gallery, Chicago
Galerie Tarica, Paris (acquired by 1979)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

London, Lord's Gallery, Kurt Schwitters, 1958, no. 28
Milan, Galleria del Naviglio, Kurt Schwitters, 1959, no. 26

Karin Orchard & Isabel Schulz, Kurt Schwitters, Catalogue raisonné, Ostfildern-Ruit, 2000, vol. III, no. 3262, illustrated p. 530

The board is stable and affixed onto a glass frame. The board presents some very fine striations due to the support, resulting in some pigments separation and there are some very fine line of shrinkage predominantly to the brown pigment, some paint losses to the thin outer frame and a 1cm long support loss towards the upper right corner towards to the upper right edge. The collage elements are predominantly stable with some very minor raising to the edges in places. This work is in good original condition.
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This exceptional collage is an outstanding example of Merz and its progression. More than ever before, this work exhibits Schwitters’ deep painterly capabilities. Deep blues, oranges and reds create textured shapes in themselves, fitting with and around the collaged card and scraps. Though Schwitters was forever aware of the importance of both paint and colour, it is hard to think of any collage in which he has allowed it so much room and variety. It is as though he is trying to ‘paint’ with the scraps of paper; they have become the medium, the material of ‘painting’. John Elderfield elaborates on this, stating that ‘whereas Schwitters had previously contained objects in pictures, now his whole pictures are like objects; and that whereas his concern had previously been to relate objects to flat surfaces, it was now to make added objects an integral part of that larger object, the picture itself. His art had always involved a sense of reciprocity between objects and surfaces. Now, illusionistic but physical surfaces enclose the added objects in an atmospheric painterly web, causing them to seem embedded in pictorial space’ (J. Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, London, 1985, p. 213).

It is interesting to consider for a moment the way in which art historians have interpreted the late work of their subjects. All too often, the division into different creative phases of a life is a posthumous projection, informed not by the artist in question, but by the interpretations of their biographers. Not so in the case of Schwitters, who as early as 1939, could not only look back on his production thus far, but also forward, to the period in which the present work sits. In a letter to his wife (1939), he wrote: ‘I can see from the work I am doing now, that in my old age I will be able to go on developing Merz. After my death it will be possible to distinguish 4 periods in my Merz work: the Sturm und Drang of the first works – in a sense revolutionary in the art world –then the dry, more scientific search for new possibilities and the laws of composition and materials, then the brilliant game with skills gained, that is to say, the present stage, and ultimately the utilization of acquired strengths in the intensification of expression. I will have achieved that in around 10 years’ (Schwitters in Britain (exhibition catalogue), Tate Britain, London, 2013, p. 56). As well as a profound understanding of the importance of Merz, Schwitters displays an astounding clarity of purpose as he foretells an ‘intensification of expression’ for his works of the 1940s. In its richness of colour, its diagonal and vertical thrusts, Fallende Papierstücke is surely the pinnacle of this prediction.

Schwitters died in 1948, not even fulfilling the 10 years he saw before him in 1939. These last years of his life were ones of exile and alien status, as he moved first from Germany to Norway in 1937, and then fled again, this time to England in 1940. He spent over a year in an internment camp on the Isle of Man, before moving to London where he remained until the end of the war. The last three years of his life he lived in the Lake District, and it is there that he would have created the present work. The only legible fragment here is that of a jumbled address, twice with the word ‘étranger’; in its context here, it means ‘abroad’, but we can imagine Schwitters’ sure sense of irony delighting in an alternative translation: ‘stranger’. Looking at other collages from the Lake District works, we see a similar use of postmarks and envelopes: Schwitters had become reliant on correspondence, to his mother, to his son, to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. To the very end he remained a ‘stranger’, an outsider, affiliated to no movement, not even Dada, loyally exploring the limits of his own œuvre, Merz. The work of later artists, and most emphatically Robert Rauschenberg, is unthinkable without the daring experiments of this one-man art movement.