Description

Kurt Schwitters ca 1935 collage ‘Untitled’

Collage of cut, torn, printed and painted papers, ephemera and graphite on cardboard

Particularity : cardboard is the cover of ‘der Blaue Reiter Almanach’

Info about cover of Der Blaue Reiter Almanach, ca 1911.

Wood cut and watercolor on cardstock. Stamped E.L. Kirchner. E.L. Kirchner ticket on reverse side.

Item on sale is an authentic Kurt Schwitters collages ‘Blessed Event’

Signed in crayon by hand

Size : 221 x 157 mm

Info on ‘der Blaue Reiter’

Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) is a designation by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc for their exhibition and publication activities, in which both artists acted as sole editors in the almanac of the same name, first published in mid-May 1912. The editorial team organized two exhibitions in Munich in 1911 and 1912 to demonstrate their art-theoretical ideas based on the works of art exhibited. Travelling exhibitions in German and other European cities followed. The Blue Rider disbanded at the start of World War I in 1914.

The artists associated with Der Blaue Reiter were important pioneers of modern art of the 20th century; they formed a loose network of relationships, but not an art group in the narrower sense like Die Brücke (The Bridge) in Dresden. The work of the affiliated artists is assigned to German Expressionism.

Info on Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany.

Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.

After studying art at the Dresden Academy alongside Otto Dix, George Grosz and of contemporary Dresden artists Die Brücke, 1909–1915, Schwitters returned to Hanover and started his artistic career as a post-impressionist. As the First World War progressed his work became darker, gradually developing a distinctive expressionist tone.

In 1918, his art was to change dramatically as a direct consequence of Germany’s economic, political, and military collapse at the end of the First World War. Quote : “In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready … Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz.

Whilst Schwitters still created work in an expressionist style into 1919 (and would continue to paint realist pictures up to his death in 1948), the first abstract collages, influenced in particular by recent works by Jean Arp, would appear in late 1918, which Schwitters dubbed Merz after a fragment of found text from the phrase Commerz Und Privatbank (commerce and private bank) in his work Das Merzbild, completed in the winter of 1918–19. By the end of 1919 he had become a well-known artist, after his first one-man exhibition at Der Sturm gallery, in June 1919, and the publication, that August, of the poem An Anna Blume (translated as ‘To Anna Flower’, or ‘To Eve Blossom’), a dadaist, non-sensical love poem.

Merz has been called ‘Psychological Collage’. Most of the works attempt to make coherent aesthetic sense of the world around Schwitters, using fragments of found objects. These fragments often make witty allusions to current events. Autobiographical elements also abound; test prints of graphic designs; bus tickets; ephemera given by friends. Later collages would feature proto-pop mass media images. Many works seem to have directly influenced Robert Rauschenberg, who said after seeing an exhibition of Schwitters’s work at the Sidney Janis Gallery, 1959, that “I felt like he made it all just for me.”

Whilst these works were usually collages incorporating found objects, such as bus tickets, old wire and fragments of newsprint, Merz also included artists’ periodicals, sculptures, sound poems and what would later be called “installations”. Schwitters was to use the term Merz for the rest of the decade, but, as Isabel Schulz has noted, ‘though the fundamental compositional principles of Merz remained the basis and centre of [Schwitters’s] creative work […] the term Merz disappears almost entirely from the titles of his work after 1931’.

Following Nazi Germany’s invasion of Norway, Schwitters was amongst a number of German citizens who were interned by the Norwegian authorities at Vågan Folk High School in Kabelvåg on the Lofoten Islands. Following his release, Schwitters fled to Leith, Scotland with his son and daughter-in-law on the Norwegian patrol vessel Fridtjof Nansen between 8 and 18 June 1940. After obtaining his freedom Schwitters moved to London, hoping to make good on the contacts that he had built up over his period of internment. During his years in London, the shift in Schwitters’s work continued towards an organic element that augmented the mass-produced ephemera of previous years with natural forms and muted colours.

On 7 January 1948 he received the news that he had been granted British citizenship. The following day, on 8 January, Schwitters died from acute pulmonary edema and myocarditis, in Kendal Hospital. He was buried on 10 January at St. Mary’s Church, Ambleside. His grave was unmarked until 1966 when a stone was erected with the inscription Kurt Schwitters – Creator of Merz. The stone remains as a memorial even though his body was disinterred and reburied in the Engesohde Cemetery in Hanover in 1970, the grave being marked with a marble copy of his 1929 sculpture Die Herbstzeitlose.