?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
KURT SCHWITTERS Eindorf.
Black chalk on cream wove paper, 1918. 205x130 mm; 8x5 1/8 inches. Initialed in pencil, lower left recto.
Provenance: The artist; thence by descent to the artist's son, Ernst Schwitters, Lysaker; Marlborough Fine Art, London and Rome, 1965; private collection, Rome; Mr. and Mrs. Morton Rome, Baltimore, Maryland; thence by descent to the current owner, private collection, Baltimore, Maryland.
Exhibited: "Kurt Schwitters", Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hanover, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Musée des Beaux-Art, Liège, 1956, number 11; "Kurt Schwitters 1887-1948", Minami Gallery, Tokyo, December 1960, number 2; "Kurt Schwitters", Ulmer Museum, Ulm March-April 1961; "Kurt Schwitters 1887-1948", Marlborough Fine Art, London (with the label), Wallraf-Richartz-Museum and Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne; Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Marlborough Galleria d'Arte, Rome, 1964, number 14; "Kurt Schwitters", University of Los Angeles, Los Angeles; Marlborough Gerson Gallery (with the label), New York; Nelson Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, 1965, number 9; "Baltimore's Print and Drawing Society 1968-1988", The Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, October 21-December 4, 1988, with the label.
Published: Werner Schmalenbach, Kurt Schwitters, 1967, page 81 (illustrated); Yoshiaki Inui, Kurt Schwitters and Illusionism of Scraps, Bijutsu Tchno, volume 22, issue 325 (March), 1970, page 169 (illustrated); Yukuke Nakahara, From 'The Lifeless View of Scrappings, Bijutsu Techo, volume 31, issue 452, August, 1979, page 129 (illustrated); Kim Behm, Die frühen Nachkriegszeichnungen von Kurt Schwitters (1918-1923), unpublished PhD, University of Marburg, 1997, figure 12; Edited by Karin Orchard and Isabel Schulz, Kurt Schwitters, Catalogue raisonné, Band I, 1905 -1922, 2000, page 144, number Z35 (illustrated).
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.
