Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)

Affiliated with the Dadaist and Constructivist movements following World War I, Fallman – Springer belongs to a series of about forty “Dadaist” watercolors executed in 1919-1920. Referring to this distinct genre, John Elderfield has written, “Some are purely abstract; one is almost straightforwardly realistic. The majority, however, introduce into Schwitters’ visual work for the first—and with few exceptions the last—time a fantastic, and at times almost insane, subject-matter of windmills, buckets, trains, fish, churches, houses and pin-figures, which together form a chaotic, invented world. Women are transformed into bottles, upside-down figures stroll like flies along ceilings, houses and churches row pigs’ tails and change into little trains which slide over crudely drawn cog-wheels and down steeply inclined lines of force” (Kurt Schwitters, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 45).