Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage

On View March 26 through June 26, 2011

Princeton University Art Museum to present
Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage
First Major U.S. Exhibition Since 1985 MoMA Retrospective 
FEATURES RECREATION OF FAMED MERZBAU INSTALLATION 
DESTROYED IN 1943

Princeton, N.J. - Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) was an integral part of Germany’s revolutionary art and intellectual movements in the tumultuous wake of the First World War. He is one of the most enduring figures of the 20th century international avant-garde, and has been cited as a profound influence by artists ranging from Robert Rauschenberg to Damian Hirst. Widely acknowledged as a great master of collage, Schwitters’ diverse body of work cut across boundaries, hierarchies and media to include painting, sculpture, typography, poems and performance pieces, and it anticipated most of the leading art movements of the late 20th century. Now, Schwitters is the subject of a major retrospective, the first in the U.S. in a generation, to be held at the Princeton University Art Museum from March 26 to June 26, 2011. 

“Kurt Schwitters is a pioneering artist whose work deserves to be better known in this country. His experiments with media, space, and sound, with the relationship between art and audience, as well as his nuanced meditations on modernity, print culture, and everyday life will come as a revelation to many,” said Kelly Baum, Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Princeton University Art Museum. 

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage marks the first major U.S. overview of the artist’s career since a Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) retrospective 26 years ago. On view at the Princeton University Art Museum March 26 - June 26, 2011, this will be the only east coast stop for the exhibition. Originated by the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, the exhibition was curated by Isabel Schulz, co-author of Schwitters’ catalogue raisonné and curator of the Kurt Schwitters Archive and Executive Director of the Kurt and Ernst Schwitters Stiftung at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, in collaboration with Menil Director Josef Helfenstein. It will travel later this year to the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum.

“This authoritative and comprehensive presentation of Kurt Schwitters is a remarkable opportunity for audiences to get to know the work of a master of international Modernism,” said James Steward, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum. “Visitors, regardless of background, will recognize this prolific and visionary artist’s profound impact on so much of our contemporary visual culture. The exhibition embodies the Princeton University Art Museum’s redoubled commitment to exploring modern and contemporary art that is at once path-forging, exceptional and accessible.” 

In 1919, Schwitters coined the term Merz, taken from a portion of the German word for commerce, to express his philosophical and artistic ambitions. Today he is known for transforming the “useless” forms of everyday life into a language and aesthetic that engaged the turmoil of the post-war era. Nailing and gluing together forgotten pieces of urban waste—train tickets, scraps of fabric, candy wrappers—Schwitters advanced collage and assemblage as integral modernist practices perhaps more than any artist of his time. 

One of Schwitters’ most fully realized projects, the Merzbau, expanded these principles into the realm of architecture. Built over the period of a decade and a half and later destroyed by the Allied bombing during the Second World War, this massive walk-in sculptural environment—a precursor to installation art—filled a portion of the artist’s Hannover, Germany home by the time he fled the Nazi regime in 1937. Exploring key pieces from Schwitters’ multifaceted work, including a full-sized recreation of the Merzbau based on wide-angle photographs taken during the 1930s, the exhibition uncovers the expressive palettes, textures and techniques behind the artist’s revolutionary work. 

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage includes 78 assemblages, sculptures and collages from 1918 to 1947, highlighting Schwitters’ compositional methods and design principles as well as his critical and often witty response to major art movements such as Expressionism, Dadaism, and Constructivism. The artist’s training as a painter was a central influence throughout his work, particularly his sensitivity to color and light. This exhibition offers the first detailed look at the significance of those two elements, unraveling the artist’s complex fusion of collage and painting. Schwitters often arranged found objects with a painter’s eye and enhanced his collages with additional layers of paint. 

The exhibition also explores Schwitters’ reception in the United States beginning in the early 1920s, when he was included in a series of exhibitions sponsored by the Société Anonyme, the renowned art organization co-founded by artists Katherine Dreier, Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray. Nevertheless, until his work surfaced in a number of New York galleries and museums after his death in 1948 at 61, Schwitters remained relatively unknown in the United States. In the 1950s, a new generation of American artists began to look to Schwitters for inspiration as a model of working with found materials. 

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage is accompanied by a fully illustrated color catalogue featuring essays by Schulz, along with scholars Leah Dickerman and Gwendolen Webster and a chronology by Menil Assistant Curator Clare Elliott. 

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage is organized by the Menil Collection, Houston. 

In Princeton, this exhibition has been made possible by the generous support of the Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Exhibitions Fund; the Apparatus Fund; the Judith and Anthony B. Evnin, Class of 1962, Exhibition Fund; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Frances and Elias Wolf, Class of 1920, Fund; the Virginia and Bagley Wright, Class of 1946, Program Fund for Modern and Contemporary Art; an anonymous foundation; and the Partners of the Princeton University Art Museum. Additional support has been made possible by the Friends of the Princeton University Art Museum.

In Houston, this exhibition was realized through the generous support of: Laura and John Arnold; Houston Endowment Inc.; The Brown Foundation, Inc.; Catherine Morgan; Mrs. Nancy Brown Negley; Karen and Harry Pinson; Louisa Stude Sarofim; Leslie and Shannon Sasser; the Taub Foundation in memory of Ben Taub, Henry J.N. Taub, and Carol J. Taub; Lionstone Group; Allison Sarofim; Marion Barthelme and Jeff Fort; Sissy and Denny Kempner, Northern Trust; Ann and Mathew Wolf; Nina and Michael Zilkha; the City of Houston and by proceeds from the inaugural evening of MEN OF MENIL. Exhibition underwriter Continental Airlines is the Preferred Airline of the Menil Collection. 

About the Museum 
Founded in 1882, the Princeton University Art Museum is one of the nation’s leading art museums. Its collections feature approximately 72,000 works of art ranging from ancient to contemporary, and concentrating geographically on the Mediterranean regions, Western Europe, Asia and the Americas, with particular strengths in Chinese painting and calligraphy, the art of the ancient Americas and pictorial photography. The Museum is committed to advancing Princeton’s teaching and research missions while serving as a gateway to the University for visitors from around the world. Intimate in scale yet expansive in scope, the Museum offers a respite from the rush of daily life, a revitalizing experience of extraordinary works of art and an opportunity to delve deeply into the study of art and culture. 

The Princeton University Art Museum is located at the heart of the Princeton campus, a short walk from Princeton’s Nassau Street. Admission is free. Hours are Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Thursday 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.; and Sunday 1 to 5 p.m. Free highlight tours of the collections are given every Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. The Museum is closed Mondays and major holidays. For information, please call (609) 258-3788 or visit the Museum’s Web site at http://artmuseum.princeton.edu.