(Hannover 1887 – 1948 Kendal, GB)
c 71 falling paper pieces, 1946, titled, signed, dated Kurt Schwitters 1946 c 71, assemblage, oil, cardboard, paper, wood on wood, 33 x 28 cm, framed

Provenance:
The artist
Thence by descent to his son Ernst Schwitters, Lysaker
Lord‘s Gallery, London, 1958 (label)
Collection Phillipe Dotremont, Brussels
New Gallery, New York (label)
B. C. Holland Gallery, Chicago (label)
Galerie Tarica, Paris (label)
Private Collection, Germany

Exhibited:
London, Lord’s Gallery, Kurt Schwitters, 1958, exhib. no. 28
Milan, Galleria del Naviglio, Kurt Schwitters, 1959, exhib. no. 26

Literature:
Karin Orchard, Isabel Schulz, Kurt Schwitters, catalogue raisonné, vol. III, 1937–1948, Ostfildern-Ruit 2006, no. 3262, p. 530 with ill.

The Hanoverian Schwitters, born the son of a businessman, is one of the most experimental and innovative artists of Classical Modernism. He was an artistically solitary figure, yet also one of the most productive personalities of the early 20th century. He studied art at the academies in Hanover and Dresden. Schwitter’s oeuvre includes collages and assemblages as well as painting, sculpture and installation art. It is thus rather difficult to reduce his career to one explicit movement. Taking his oeuvre as a whole, his early work is focused on the impressionist and expressionist style, and later on constructivism, Dadaism, and surrealism. He addresses these different styles playfully and self-deprecatingly.
The material is a decisive criterion in Schwitters’ art: everyday things, anything used and discarded or left behind, such as old tram tickets, cloakroom tokens, scraps of paper and correspondence, is put into a new context in his artworks. His dense pictorial architectures are often supplemented by words, numbers and overpainting.
He transgresses the boundaries of classical painting and counteracts the traditional concept of the work. He transfers discarded objects into a new materiality and thus gives them a different, often absurdly senseless meaning. He summarises his compositions under the term “Merz”, which can be traced back to an accidentally found snippet of the word “Commerz”. The disruption of the post-war period is a focus for Schwitters, and his compositions criticise contemporary materialism in the wasteful society of post-World War I Weimar Germany.
He spent his last years in the Lake District in Great Britain, where the present work was created. It exemplifies the further development of his numerous assemblages created since 1918. In its blaze of colour with deep blues, oranges and reds, its emphasis on painterly skills, its diagonal and vertical thrusts, „Fallende Papierstücke“ (Falling Pieces of Paper) is certainly one of the highlights of his oeuvre. Although it is a collage, painting remains a significant focus. The pieces of paper now come together to form the picture itself, instead of being supplementary accessories to a painted surface. The individual scraps of paper are elevated to the medium of painting. They fit together harmoniously to form a „painterly“ complete work. “His [Schwitters‘] art always contained a sense of reciprocity between objects and surfaces. Now illusionistic yet physical surfaces enclose the added objects in an atmospheric painterly net and make them appear embedded in the pictorial space.”

J. Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, London, 1985, p. 213