C 38 intensiv grey

C 38 intensiv grey is a heavily worked Merzbild from Schwitters' last period of great creativity. In December 1944, Schwitters held his sole one-man show in England, at the Modern Art Gallery. At this exhibition, Herbert Read announced Schwitters as, “the supreme master of the collage,” pointing out that the artist had devised a practice of “making art out of anything” by “taking up the stones which the builders had rejected and making something of them.” “I doubt,” Read continued, “that Schwitters would like to be called a mystic, but there is nevertheless in his whole attitude to art a deep protest against the chromium-plated conception of modernism. The bourgeois love slickness and polish: Schwitters hates them. He leaves the edges rough, his surfaces uneven” (Kurt Schwitters, Paintings and Sculptures of Kurt Schwitters, The Founder of Dadaism and “Merz”, London, 1944).
Complex and heavily layered with a wide range of torn and fragmented scraps including a print of an ornate architectural drawing, decorated grey wrapping paper bearing the text ‘War Time’ and ‘Rowntree York England,’ and a bright turquoise square. This Merzbild is typical of Schwitters' late style—more freely and intuitively constructed than his earlier classic, self-conscious and geometric constructions. Along with an increasing organic quality to his work of the 1930s and 1940s, Schwitters' late collages reflect the artist's assured confidence and command of his medium.