Kurt Schwitters

The Spring Door is the title Kurt Schwitters gave to this work from 1938. Here, the artist painted and worked on a wooden panel, parts of which remain visible. Onto this surface he drew, in pencil, a composition of sickle-shaped forms and segments of circles. The shapes overlap and intersect. Schwitters painted the areas created by this drawing only in part, using white alongside shades of green, orange, and blue. In the upper section, he nailed several wooden slats across the painted surface, forming something like a frame. On the slat on the far left, he attached a small sign bearing the number “22”. In the lower section, several pieces of wood and metal were nailed on, as well as the heel of a shoe. In the lower right corner there is a stone set in plaster.

The wooden slats recall a door frame. Perhaps the door is open, allowing a view onto a spring landscape – after all, the work is titled The Spring Door. The painting may well be read as an image of nature, or even of a landscape – an abstract reduction to the circling forces of nature, to growth and change. The stone, as a concrete object from nature, fits this idea perfectly. The shoe heel, meanwhile, introduces the human presence – perhaps a figure stepping out into nature.

The number 22 may be a reference to the house number of Kurt Schwitters’ home in Lysaker in Norway. He created this work on the island of Hjertøya, in the fjord off Molde. Schwitters first visited Hjertøya in 1929 on a journey to Norway with his wife. They spent the summer months there regularly from 1930. A small stone hut, which Schwitters converted, became their home on the island from 1932. Later, the artist would continue to transform the hut in the spirit of a Merzbau. The island of Hjertøya, just three kilometres long, became for Schwitters a paradisiacal ideal landscape.