LOT 220

A Pair of Collage by Schwitters

Medium: Fabric & Collage on paper, laid on board.  Signed.

Size:

7.6 x 5.9 in, width (19.3 x 14.9 cm, width)​

4.1 x 5.10 in, width (10.2 x 12.9 cm, width)

Estimate $30,000 - $50,000

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Ketterer Kunst, Munchen 1997,

Acquired from the above by the late owner.

Collage from Schwitters last years when the artist what living in the Lake District in England.  Forced to exile in Norway where he had fled Nazi Germany to live with his son Ernst.  Schwitters had again been forced to flee England when the Nazi's invaded Norway in 1940. After a period of internment in England (as an enemy alien) he had a brief period living in London, Schwitters settled in Ambleside near Lake Windermere in the Lake District in the company of a young Englishwoman, Edith Thomas, whom he called Wantee. Schwitters wife Helma had died in Hanover in 1944 and his life's work, The Merzbau, had been destroyed in a bombing raid on the city in 1943.  Although impoverished and almost completely neglected by the art establishment in Britain, Schwitters saw little reason for a return to Germany, preferring to live out what he knew to be his last years with Wantee in England.

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Large, complex, and heavily layered with a wide range of torn and fragmented scraps, this collage ia a typical Schwitters late style being more feely and intuitively constructed that his earlier mor classic, self-conscious and geometric constructions; Along with an increasing organic quality to his work of the 1930's and 1940's.  Schwitters collages reflected the artist's assured confidence and command of his medium.  In his last work made in the Lake District, a dramatic liberality is often present in the construction of his collages.

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