Kurt Schwitters

This painting is part of a series of around forty watercolours that Kurt Schwitters painted in 1919. In the period following the First World War, a new understanding of art began to take shape in his work. The orderly world of his earlier, naturalistic paintings now gave way to a world in ruins, one that no longer contained any internal order. Dadaist experiments characterise this phase of his artistic practice. These include his stamp drawings as well as this series of watercolours.

In the watercolour on display here, number 11, Schwitters created a strange, fantastical, almost surreal scene. He brought together very different motifs whose relationship to one another is not immediately clear. On the left-hand side, the artist depicted two figures. A male figure flies upside down across the image. He is wearing a hat – but it sits the wrong way round on his head. Below him is a woman, apparently enclosed in a bottle. She may be the “Frau Gans”, or “Mrs Goose”, referred to in the subtitle of the work, as she is looking at a goose. This goose has arrow-like feet, and a single eye is embedded in its body. On the right-hand side of the picture stands a windmill. At the upper edge, in the centre, a small house floats through the air inside a bubble.

The image is a kind of landscape, a little still life and also a portrait – and at the same time none of these at all. Everything is out of kilter, wildly in motion and seemingly thrown together. Everything appears to be moving, rotating or flying. It is an absurd world that has come apart at the seams.

The apparently random juxtaposition of different objects recalls the attitude of the Surrealists. In Schwitters’ case, however, this is not a chance encounter, but a deliberate composition. It is more closely related to the Dadaist technique of collage – the conscious assembling of different fragments from different materials and different contexts.