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Lot Essay
Ohne Title (G. Strindberg) (Untitled (G Strindberg)) 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'. Schwitters' wife Helma had died in Hannover 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 of a return to Germany, preferring to live out what he knew to be his last years with 'Wantee' in England.
Ohne Title (G. Strindberg) is a typical and heavily worked Merzbild from Schwitters' last period of great creativity and is full of the fragments of his daily life and personal correspondence. The title of the work refers to Schwitters' son Ernst's friend Gert Strindberg a relative of the famous playwright who had lived with Schwitters and his son in their house in Westmoreland Road, Barnes, London during the war. Also visible in this collage are fragments of a letter from Oslo and a letter to Schwitters at his address in Ambleside at 2 Gale Crescent on the hillside above the Lakeside town.
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 40s 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 Merzbilder. In Ohne Title (G. Strindberg) this confident sense of freedom is combined with a heavy layering of imagery and even the visual game of a picture-within-a-picture through the artist's use of a cardboard photograph frame to build a particular bold and intense composition.
Ohne Title (G. Strindberg) is a typical and heavily worked Merzbild from Schwitters' last period of great creativity and is full of the fragments of his daily life and personal correspondence. The title of the work refers to Schwitters' son Ernst's friend Gert Strindberg a relative of the famous playwright who had lived with Schwitters and his son in their house in Westmoreland Road, Barnes, London during the war. Also visible in this collage are fragments of a letter from Oslo and a letter to Schwitters at his address in Ambleside at 2 Gale Crescent on the hillside above the Lakeside town.
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 40s 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 Merzbilder. In Ohne Title (G. Strindberg) this confident sense of freedom is combined with a heavy layering of imagery and even the visual game of a picture-within-a-picture through the artist's use of a cardboard photograph frame to build a particular bold and intense composition.