‘Merz’ founder Kurt Schwitters worked with fragmentary materials and detritus which remained at the core of his collages, sculpture and installation. He left Nazi Germany for Norway in 1937, arriving in Britain in 1940, only to be interned until 1941 on the Isle of Man. After release, he lived briefly in London, moving to the Lake District in his final years.
This work exemplifies Schwitters’ highly individual way of working, fusing his interest in the avant- garde group Dada - which saw the modern world as meaningless - with a collage technique. It was acquired directly from the Fraenkel family in June 2019 and provides a fascinating link between these two refugees from Nazism, whose earlier friendship was rekindled in England. The inclusion of the word ‘Paris’ references Franekel’s time there during the 1920s and 1930s, and Schwitters himself visited Paris in 1927.
Metzger saw two exhibitions of Schwitters’ work in 1958 and 1959 which affected his own way of working. Both the choice of unpretentious materials and the strongly improvised working method much have appealed to Metzger. Central to Schwitters’ practice was the idea not to achieve an end result, but to maintain an ongoing process. Much later Metzger recalled, ‘of course, ’59 was the year I moved out of painting, so there’s no question that these two Schwitters exhibitions were significant’. Very much interested in Schwitters’ collages, Metzger also stated, ‘Dada and surrealism and constructivism- all the “isms”- are also elements I came onto when I was very young, especially when I arrived in London’.
