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Lot Essay
'Abstract art that had developed during World War I benefited from the example of Kandinsky's nonfigurative vocabulary, and many European artists absorbed this vocabulary as well as various occult texts. The development of artists who could utilize pre-existing abstract forms naturally differed from that of the first generation of abstract pioneers, who greatly feared that meaning might be lost along with the discarded object' (M. Tuchman, op. cit., 1987, p. 45). Within the second generation of 'abstract pioneers' interested in mystical concepts, were Jean Arp and Kurt Schwitters.
Abstrakte Komposition, one of the rare oils of Schwitters' pictorial corpus, is a very good exampl of the artist's fascination with the magic and the occult, an aspect of his aesthetics inquired into by J. Enderfield (catalogue of the exhibition Kurt Schwitters, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 92): 'Schwitters was never as explicit [as Kandinsky], being too much of a formalist to admit that the materials he used carried a spiritual charge. But he did write that his was generally a spiritual, even a Christian art. Schwitters' belief in self-discipline and in a benevolent order of creation might be called Christian. However, his spirituality is broader than that. Like many other Dadaists, he seems to have felt that the order of the world was in part hopelessly absurd and in part dynamic and charged. He rejected the Expressionist idea of ecstatic union with nature, yet he retained its primitivism. We sense in his work a belief even in animism and hylozoism - primitive ideas that objects have souls and God and matter are one and the same... And he did write to Herbert Read thanking him for describing his art as mystical'.
The present canvas, together with the Abstrakte Komposition of the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (fig.1), is built around an unusually geometric cast, epitomising Schwitter's theoretical and artistic research on the golden section - a quest for pure proportions and mathematical abstractions which occupied the artist's speculations in the second decade of the century.
Sold with a certificate of authenticity from Professor Dr Werner Schmalenbach, dated Dsseldorf, den 19.11.90.
This work is listed in the artist's archive under Nr. 1923/24 1625.
Abstrakte Komposition, one of the rare oils of Schwitters' pictorial corpus, is a very good exampl of the artist's fascination with the magic and the occult, an aspect of his aesthetics inquired into by J. Enderfield (catalogue of the exhibition Kurt Schwitters, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1985, p. 92): 'Schwitters was never as explicit [as Kandinsky], being too much of a formalist to admit that the materials he used carried a spiritual charge. But he did write that his was generally a spiritual, even a Christian art. Schwitters' belief in self-discipline and in a benevolent order of creation might be called Christian. However, his spirituality is broader than that. Like many other Dadaists, he seems to have felt that the order of the world was in part hopelessly absurd and in part dynamic and charged. He rejected the Expressionist idea of ecstatic union with nature, yet he retained its primitivism. We sense in his work a belief even in animism and hylozoism - primitive ideas that objects have souls and God and matter are one and the same... And he did write to Herbert Read thanking him for describing his art as mystical'.
The present canvas, together with the Abstrakte Komposition of the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (fig.1), is built around an unusually geometric cast, epitomising Schwitter's theoretical and artistic research on the golden section - a quest for pure proportions and mathematical abstractions which occupied the artist's speculations in the second decade of the century.
Sold with a certificate of authenticity from Professor Dr Werner Schmalenbach, dated Dsseldorf, den 19.11.90.
This work is listed in the artist's archive under Nr. 1923/24 1625.