VISUAL ARTS & MUSEUMS

Home > VISUAL ARTS & MUSEUMS > Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage

• Tweet
• Outlook
• ICAL
• PRINT
• Email
• Feedback

• RSS

• Official Website
• Add to My Favorites

Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage

Presented by Menil Collection at Menil Collection

October 22, 2010-January 30, 2011

Add Review/Comment
Comment on Facebook

The Menil Collection presents the exhibition Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage. On view October 22, 2010– January 30, 2011.  Guest curated by Isabel Schulz, co-editor of the Kurt Schwitters catalogue raisonné and curator of the Kurt Schwitters Archive at the Sprengel Museum Hannover, in collaboration with Menil Director Josef Helfenstein, Color and Collage will present key works from American and European museums and private collections.

The German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) remains one of the most influential figures of the international avant-garde. In the years following the First World War he coined the term “Merz,” in reference to his ambition to “make connections …between everything in the world.” Hoping to unify life and art by incorporating non-art into his work, this pioneer of installation art came closest to his ideal with his Merzbau, a room-size walk-in sculpture constructed of found materials.

Schwitters was more consistent and eclectic than any other modern artist in his use of found and seemingly worthless objects. In addition to what such detritus implied about the times, its textures, patina, and colors produced the aesthetic and expressive effects in Schwitters’s revolutionary work.

Placing special emphasis on the significance of color and light in the artist’s work and delving into the relationship between collage and painting, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage will present the first overview in the U.S. of the artist’s oeuvre since the MoMA retrospective of 1985. In addition to a full-scale reconstruction of the Merzbau, the exhibition will include roughly 100 assemblages, reliefs, sculptures, and collages from 1918–1947, with emphasis on Merz works from the 1920s and 1940s.

Seen against the background of the Menil Collection’s own holdings, Schwitters’s art opens the door to central concepts and working methods of a younger generation of artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly, who feature prominently in the museum’s holdings.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue featuring essays by Schulz along with noted scholars Leah Dickerman and Gwendolen Webster.

Pictured:  Kurt Schwitters Mz 371 bacco [Mz 371 bacco], 1922, Collage of cut and torn printed, handwritten, tissue, and coated papers on paperboard Sheet: 11; Image: 6-1/4 x Sheet: 7-1/2; Image: 4-7/8 inches The Menil Collection, Houston Photo: Hickey-Robertson, Houston.