Schwitters' revolution, shown in context and collage

The newest exhibition at the University Art Museum is Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage. On display until June 26, the exhibition comes to Princeton from The Menil Collection in Houston, Texas, and afterwards will travel to the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive. The exhibition is well laid-out and boasts a strong, broad collection of his works — roughly one hundred assemblages, reliefs, sculptures and collages from 1918 to 1947, in addition to a full-scale reconstruction of the “Merzbau.”

The remarkable part about the exhibition is that it is the first overview of Schwitters’s work in the United States since his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1985. Though it may confound the modern-day viewer, the work comes alive when taken in its historical context.

Today, the idea of collage is not revolutionary, but around the time of World War I, Schwitters’ work was completely new. Unlike abstraction, which is relatively timeless and ahistorical, collage is grounded in current events and everyday life, and thus drew artists who wished to create work about the world in which they lived.

Schwitters (1887-1948) was a German artist who emerged as a preeminent member of the international avant-garde in the years following the First World War. Responding to the changes, chaos and turmoil that plagued German society, Schwitters created a distinct form of art that combined aspects of art and life, using found objects and everyday materials.

His work often explores the importance of light and color in addition to the relationship between collage and painting. Schwitters coined the term “Merz,” which alluded to his ambition to “make connections ... between everything in the world.” His main goal was to combine art and life by adding non-art into his work. His assemblages and collages combine paper, fabric, oils, gouache, chalk and watercolor, stimulating the viewer with their numerous textures, colors, forms and orientation — for example, cropped, inverted or rotated.

The highlight of the exhibition is the “Merzbau,” a room-sized walk-in sculpture that is constructed of found materials. Influenced by the constructivist concept of the total environment, Schwitters aimed to integrate architecture, furniture and art in a single space.

According to his son, Schwitters was interested in the relationship between the pictures on the walls and the sculptures on the floor. He began to investigate this relationship by tying strings them to emphasize their interaction. These strings evolved into wires and eventually became wooden structures, which he then joined with plaster. The construction grew and created little niches and caves in some of the internal spaces. These elements of the work appear in the reconstruction and, as one moves around the space, it is easy to discover these different angles, grottos and connections between floor, ceiling, walls, space and structure.

Schwitters was forced to stop work when he fled Germany in 1936. At the time, he claimed that the “Merzbau” was unfinished — in principle, its growth could continue indefinitely. Schwitters was never able to return to Germany and the “Merzbau” was destroyed in a raid in October 1943.

Overall, the Schwitters exhibition is worth the visit not only for the unique opportunity to see so many of his works at once, but also because, taken together, they provide a good sense of what it was like to live in Germany in the years following World War I. When looking at Schwitters’s work, one can easily see the influence he had on artists of a younger generation, including Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Cy Twombly.