Kurt Schwitters

“There is no new art here, apart from architecture, but the country is indescribably beautiful. The fjords, our island, Oslo, Stockholm, the Viking ships – that is probably the most important thing.”

Kurt Schwitters wrote this in July 1937 in a letter to an acquaintance. He had begun his life in exile in Norway earlier that year. Together with his son Ernst, he lived in Lysaker near Oslo, spending the summer months mainly in Molde and on the nearby island of Hjertøya. In Norway, he was largely isolated from the art scene and from his artist friends. As he himself notes, there was no avant-garde art scene in Norway.

In order to earn a living nonetheless, Schwitters increasingly devoted himself to landscape and portrait painting. He accepted portrait commissions, and was able to sell his landscape paintings to tourists. These landscapes were perhaps not merely a means of earning a living – Schwitters also saw a connection between the study of nature and abstract art. In a letter written in 1937, he stated:

“I paint landscapes and portraits, and I continue to develop further as a result. I do not hold the view that painting should no longer concern itself with nature as an individual phenomenon, now that abstract composition has proved to be the best solution in compositional terms.”

In the same letter, he also stressed the importance of the “dispassionate study of nature” alongside abstract composition. On closer inspection of his landscape paintings, however, one gains the impression that they did indeed primarily serve as a means of earning a living. For a long time, they were also regarded as a secondary by-product – as aesthetically shallow and a purely commercial endeavour.