Lot 515 : Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)

Kurt Schwitters - 1887-1948

Auction Location: United Kingdom - 2005
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Artist or Maker:

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)

Title:

Ohne Titel (Ross mit englischem Penny)

Description:

Ohne Titel (Ross mit englischem Penny)
collage on board
18 3/4 x 15 in. (47.7 x 38.2 cm.), oval
Executed circa 1945

Provenance:

Ernst Schwitters, Lysaker, by whom inherited from the artist, until 1959.
Anonymous sale, Gutekunst & Klipstein, Bern, 6 June 1959, lot 773 (illustrated pl. 20).
Acquired from the above sale by Dr Georg and Josi Guggenheim.

Exhibited:

Zurich, Kunstgewerbemuseum der Stadt Zurich, Collagen. Die Geschichte der Collage, June - August 1968, n.n. (illustrated p. 149).
Vienna, Kunstforum Wien, Kurt Schwitters, March - June 2002, no. 103.

Notes:

This work is recorded in the archive of the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung.

Following the Nazi invasion of Norway in 1940, Schwitters, in the company of his son Ernst and daughter-in-law Esther, fled to England. On arrival he was interned as an enemy alien, spending seventeen months in various camps before ending up at Douglas on the Isle of Wight. The board upon which the present work is executed is marked with a network of pencil lines suggesting that it was originally used for the popular board game Mühlebrett. It is known that Kurt and Ernst played Mühlebrett during their internment on the Isle of Wight.

On Schwitters' release he moved to London, staying at a flat in Bayswater. Here he met Edith Thomas who became his carer in his later years and with whom he moved to the Lake District at the end of the war. During these years of exile in England Schwitters continued to make Merz collages such as the present work, including trivial items of everyday life assembled together to form a sort of autobiographical statement. In Ohne Titel (Ross mit englischem Penny), not only do we have the improvised Mühlebrett board, but there are fragmentary bus tickets, cigarette paper, Basel postmark and newspaper adertisements, together with two bird feathers and an English coin.

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