Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters painted this oil on cardboard in 1917. He applied the paint in broad, parallel brushstrokes using thick, viscous paint. As a result, the natural forms of the landscape motif take on a geometric, planar quality. The brushstrokes in the darker areas of the trees are looser and more vigorous. This gives the impression that the trees are being stirred by a strong wind. Schwitters worked with dark, natural colours. Only in the area of the sky and slightly below the centre of the composition, in the path shown, do lighter passages stand out.

Here, the artist depicted a landscape near Opherdicke, a small village in Westphalia close to Dortmund. Kurt and Helma Schwitters spent their honeymoon there over the turn of the year from 1915 to 1916. An early supporter of the artist from Hanover made his house in Opherdicke available to the couple. After this trip, the artist gradually began to move away from traditional, naturalistic painting. As the painting shows, Schwitters was beginning to engage with the stylistic tendencies of modern art movements. The geometric quality of the surfaces is related to both Cubism and to the work of Paul Cézanne. The rough, untamed quality, by contrast, recalls Expressionism, as well as the works of Vincent van Gogh.

Schwitters may well have encountered these new stylistic tendencies much earlier. From 1909 onwards he studied in Dresden, where the artists’ group Die Brücke had already been formed four years earlier by figures such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. With their Expressionist works and everyday urban subjects, they caused a sensation, and Dresden became a hotspot of modern art. During his student years, however, Schwitters seems not to have taken notice of this development. It was only now – in 1917 – that his works began to reflect an engagement with modernism.