?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 4,000 - $ 6,000
KURT SCHWITTERS Auswuchten von Rädern.
Lithograph on tan wove paper, 1919. 115x90 mm; 4 3/4x3 3/4 inches, full margins. Signed, dated and inscribed "I. 22" in pencil, lower margin. A very good impression of this exceedingly scarce lithograph.
We have not found another impression at auction in the past 30 years. We have located only one other impression of this lithograph in a public collection, at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
Born in Hanover, Schwitters (1887-1948) studied at the Dresden Academy then returned to his hometown where he experimented with a variety of modern styles before finding his own. Like many artists of the late 1910s, he was trying to make sense of the devastating aftermath of World War I. As he stated, "The Great War is over, in a certain manner the world is in ruins, and so I pick up its pieces, I build a new reality." His new reality came in the form of collages or what he called "Merz" works—constructions made from found objects. In 1919, he did his first Merz work, and while he became associated with many movements throughout his career, he applied this invented term to his creative activities throughout his life, including paintings, sculptures, poetry and sound. He even turned his homes into experimental constructions he called Merzbau.
He became acquainted with Dada in the late 1910s when he was involved with Der Sturm and met Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, Jean Arp and other leading figures of the anti-art movement. While some Dadaists viewed Schwitters's work as too concerned with form, he nevertheless, kept close ties to the Dadaists in Zurich and Berlin and employed their ideas frequently.
