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Lot Essay
Ohne Titel (Frankreich) is a Merz collage from Schwitters' last years when the artist was living in the Lake District in England. Forced into exile in Norway where he had fled Nazi Germany to live with his son Ernst, Schwitters had again been forced to flee to England when the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940. After a period of internment in England (as an enemy alien) and a brief period living in London, Schwitters settled in Ambleside near Lake Windermere in the Lake District in the company of a young English woman Edith Thomas whom he called 'Wantee.' Schwitters' wife Helma had died in Hanover in 1944 and his life's work, the Merzbau, had been destroyed in a bombing raid on the city in 1943. Although impoverished and almost completely neglected by the art establishment in Britain, Schwitters saw little reason for a return to Germany, preferring to live out what he knew to be his last years with Wantee in England.
Large, complex and heavily layered with a wide range of torn and fragmented scraps, this Merzbild 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. In his last work made in the Lake District a dramatic liberality is often present in the construction of his collages.
Large, complex and heavily layered with a wide range of torn and fragmented scraps, this Merzbild 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. In his last work made in the Lake District a dramatic liberality is often present in the construction of his collages.