White

The present work is a Merz collage from Schwitters' last years when the artist was living in the Lake District in England. Forced into exile from 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' because she often asked, “Want tea?” 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.
The present work combines large areas of painted geometric shapes with collage elements – a juxtaposition of real objects and geometric ones. During his late period, Schwitters took a growing interest in the very substance of paint, which lends the work a painterly and tactile physicality. This is seen in White in the emphasis on surface and on the various textures the painted areas display, alongside the gauze and glass collage elements that finely merge with the oil paint, providing an intrinsic cohesion to the whole. With its linearity recalling the constructivism of the Merzbilds of the 1920s (as well as the art of former friends and colleagues like Moholy-Nagy, El Lissitzky and Van Doesburg) it in part seems to echo the mathematical geometry that underpinned Schwitters' earlier more doctrinaire International Constructivist style.