

Writing about the artist’s later works, John Elderfield comments: “The creation of order, as much as the order itself, was the subject of what he did: the sense of competition between the artist and his surroundings that is given along with the order adds drama and excitement even to his smallest creations...For Schwitters, it was a kind of struggle that admitted no final or single victory, but had to be fought out daily as new surroundings, new styles, new influences kept on altering the context in which he worked. Neither this nor the order to which he was committed ever changed. The point of order he wrested from the tumult of his early revolutionary years became the ideal to which he was henceforth committed. The fight for that order continued throughout his life” (John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, New York, 1985, p. 240).