Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948)

The present lot was first owned by one of 20th-century art's most influential figures, Katherine S. Dreier. For nearly thirty years she was one of the most crucial influences in the artist’s life. Katherine Dreier, as well as being a close friend of the artist and his wife, was the first to introduce Schwitters’s work to the American public. She frequently exhibited his collages at her own Société Anonyme, and through her close association with Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she established the basis for Schwitters’s enduring reputation in the USA.

Large, complex and heavily layered with a wide range of torn and fragmented scraps, this Examiner 2861 is typical of Schwitters' late style being more freely and intuitively constructed than his earlier more classic, self-conscious and geometric constructions. Along with an increasing organic quality to his work of the 1930s and 1940s, Schwitters' collages reflected the artist's assured confidence and command of his medium.

Explaining his Merz collages Schwitters wrote: "The word Merz denotes essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes, and technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials. Merzmalerei makes use not only of paint and canvas, brush and palette, but of all materials perceptible to the eye." (J. Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, London, 1985, p. 50).