2. Edging Towards Abstraction

The First World War had a profound impact on Kurt Schwitters’s art. Both the war itself and the grave crisis that followed in its wake shattered his confidence in the old world order. He felt he could no longer look to traditional forms of painting to provide an adequate response to the troubles and turmoil of his time. Several years later, he joined his fellow artists like Paul Klee, Jacoba van Heemskerck and Wassily Kandinsky, who had embraced abstraction. Schwitters worked more and more with simplified, reduced forms, with lines and colours taking centre stage, and the resulting paintings transformed into rhythmic compositions of light and dark, evoking the sense of a volatile, uncertain world. The artist’s Z‑Drawings and Abstractions from 1918 represent his first foray into abstract art and mark an important turning point in his artistic practice.

Background: For medical reasons, Kurt Schwitters was exempted from serving on the front line during the First World War. Instead, he was required to work as a technical draughtsman in an ironworks, where he produced engineering and design drawings, which provided precise, detailed depictions of mechanical parts and devices. He also wrote poems during this period, which were fairly conventional at first and replete with romantic and nature-related themes. However, as the war dragged on, his poems grew increasingly expressive and experimental, becoming more free-flowing and employing expressionistic, gloomy language. In the final months of the First World War, Schwitters also exhibited his work for the first time in the Berlin gallery Der Sturm, which was known for promoting abstract and expressionist art and literature and helps him break through.