The Musée national Picasso-Paris devotes a major retrospective to Kurt Schwitters, the first in France since 1994. Kurt Schwitters. Le chaos-monde 1918-1948 brings together more than three hundred works and documents, including paintings, sculptures, assemblages, collages, drawings, sketchbooks, photographs, books and archives, to convey the richness of an artist who defies classification. Born in Hanover in 1887, Schwitters was a painter, poet, musician, sculptor, typographer, magazine editor and event organiser. His work grew out of the collective experience of the destruction of the First World War and the climate of radical reinvention on the German art scene between the wars. Close to Dada and Constructivism without ever fully joining either, he founded a movement of his own, Merz, a name taken from a fragment of the word "Commerzbank" cut out of a newspaper and pasted into a picture. With Merz, Schwitters turned what society discarded into art: tram tickets, labels, press cuttings, pieces of wood and metal picked up in the street became "harmonious" material for collages and assemblages. The same principle extended to poetry, built as a collage of words, and to music, with the celebrated Ursonate, a sonata of primal sounds that the artist performed himself. In his home in Hanover he built the Merzbau, an organic architecture of angles, niches and cavities that gradually took over the rooms, destroyed by bombing in 1943. Branded a "degenerate" artist by the Nazis, Schwitters left Germany in 1937 for Norway and then, after the German invasion, for the United Kingdom, where he was interned and where he died in 1948 in Kendal, in the Lake District, while working on a final Merzbau. Exile did not halt his research, which the exhibition follows through to his last years. The venue is no coincidence. The exhibition, curated by Cécile Godefroy, now a curator at MoMA in New York, and Johan Popelard of the Musée Picasso, highlights the affinities with Picasso: the same freedom to experiment, the same interest in collage and in transforming everyday materials, the same determination to redefine the boundaries of art. Schwitters also took part in several key moments of geometric abstraction in interwar Paris.
