Kurt Schwitters

This oil painting from 1930 clearly shows the direction in which Kurt Schwitters’ Merz art developed towards the end of the 1920s. The work has the appearance of a collage made up of different coloured areas. In fact, however, it is painted entirely in oil. Schwitters composed the image from irregular, angular shapes. Their colours range from the primary colours red, yellow and blue to beige tones, as well as black and white. The result is a highly dynamic composition of areas that appear to overlap. In 1926, Schwitters formulated his approach as follows:

“The most important thing in a picture is rhythm – in lines, surfaces, light and dark, and colours; in short, the rhythm of the parts of the artwork, of the material. Rhythm is expressed most clearly in an abstract work of art.”

As early as the beginning of the 1920s, Schwitters established contacts with various artists working in abstract and geometric painting. He was acquainted with Theo van Doesburg, a representative of the Dutch group De Stijl. In 1922, van Doesburg organised the Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists in Weimar, an attempt to create a unified avant-garde – an effort that ultimately failed. Schwitters took part in this congress, where he met Constructivist artists such as El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy. From the late 1920s onwards, he became a member of several groups: the abstract painters from hanover; from 1929, the Paris-based group Cercle et Carré; and a year later, Abstraction – Création. All of these groups were dedicated to abstract art.

What united Schwitters with these artists was the search for an “elementary art”. As he himself noted, this led him towards greater rigour, simplification, and more general forms of expression. His abstract works are still, in many cases, collages, but the recognisable everyday objects – the rubbish of his time – largely disappear. At the same time, Schwitters kept his distance from dogmatic Constructivism and politically driven Dadaism.