352 pages
|
22 color plates, 98 halftones
|
7 x 10
| Chicago
© 2013
German artist Kurt Schwitters
(1887–1948) is best known for his pioneering work in fusing collage and
abstraction, the two most transformative innovations of
twentieth-century art. Considered the father of installation art,
Schwitters was also a theorist, a Dadaist, and a writer whose influence
extends from Robert Rauschenberg and Eva Hesse to Thomas Hirschhorn. But
while his early experiments in collage and installation from the
interwar period have garnered much critical acclaim, his later work has
generally been ignored. In the first book to fill this gap, Megan R.
Luke tells the fascinating, even moving story of the work produced by
the aging, isolated artist under the Nazi regime and during his years in
exile.
Combining new biographical material with
archival research, Luke surveys Schwitters’s experiments in shaping
space and the development of his Merzbau, describing his
haphazard studios in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom and the smaller,
quieter pieces he created there. She makes a case for the enormous
relevance of Schwitters’s aesthetic concerns to contemporary artists,
arguing that his later work provides a guide to new narratives about
modernism in the visual arts. These pieces, she shows, were born of
artistic exchange and shaped by his rootless life after exile, and they
offer a new way of thinking about the history of art that privileges
itinerancy over identity and the critical power of humorous inversion
over unambiguous communication. Packed with images, Kurt Schwitters completes the narrative of an artist who remains a considerable force today.
Michael White, University of York
“A surprising
and penetrating account of ‘Merz,’ this book gives Schwitters his
rightful place at the very heart of the theorization of modernism
and offers one of the most illuminating accounts I have come across
of the implications of his practice for the intersections of art and
identity.”
Nancy J. Troy, Stanford University
“This is a powerful and
exceptionally articulate treatment of a complex and fascinating artist
whose work is diverse and often eccentric, but also important and
extraordinarily influential in its time and after. No other scholar has
granted Schwitters’s late work the depth of appreciation and importance
that Luke accords the output of this period. She brings to this project a
keen sensitivity to the formal issues that lie at the heart of
Schwitters’s work and ideas across his entire career. Her book makes a
significant contribution to the literature on Schwitters and should be
read by scholars and students of both modern and postmodern art.”
Ralph Ubl, University of Basel
“This book joins
rigorous scholarship and rich close readings, providing readers with a
compelling and comprehensive new interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’s
artistic, literary, and theoretical work. But it does much more than
that. Questioning the art-historical preference for beginnings, it looks
at Dada, constructivism, and other crucial moments of avant-garde art
from the viewpoint of the aging and exiled artist. This change of
perspective offers a lesson of far-reaching significance for our
increasingly dis- tant take on twentieth-century art: that modernism
itself persevered and thrived thanks to engaging deeply with its own
increasingly remote past.”
