Lot 260 D α

This Merz drawing was created one year before Kurt Schwitters's death, during a phase of extraordinary artistic productivity. Schwitters dedicated it to an interesting historical figure, the psychiatrist and writer Karl Theodor Bluth, who came to London as a German exile in 1936.
Born in Berlin in 1892, Bluth first completed a degree in philosophy and literature in Bonn, Berlin and Jena; he then began studying medicine in Rostock in 1918, completing these studies with his doctoral thesis in Berlin. While a student, he also wrote poems and plays. In the 1910s and 1920s, Bluth maintained close contact with writers and artists, such as Johannes R. Becher, Franz Blei, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Ludwig Meidner. He became a staunch adversary of Hitler early on and used plays and newspaper articles to oppose the Nazi party. A play that he had already written in 1924 and which criticised the government was forbidden in 1930; in 1933 his literary works were among those affected by the book burnings. When his certification as a medical doctor was also revoked in 1934, Bluth found himself forced to emigrate. In 1936 he moved to the United Kingdom, where he ultimately settled in London. He opened a psychiatric practice there and it soon became an important focal point for an illustrious circle of patients consisting of English and exiled German writers, actors and artists. They valued Bluth on account of his unorthodox methods of treatment and his responsiveness to their creative work, which was based on his own activity as a writer. In 1943 Bluth became a member of the German PEN Club in London. He may have met Kurt Schwitters through contacts there. From 1945 Bluth corresponded with the artist, who gave him this Merz drawing as a present in 1947.
Light shades of brown, white and grey dominate the centre of the picture; black and dark-grey forms push their way in, coming from the edges. Layers of paper are superimposed in diverse ways, and complex fragments seem to rotate around the visually stationary centre composed of larger forms. Something that John Elderfield has already noted regarding Schwitters's late collages becomes visible: “Instead of deploying the materials in such a way that they seem to float on a fictive, fantasy-based space where every piece of paper delineates a spatially clearly outlined area, he drastically constricts the pictorial space. […] And in order to keep the spatial compression achieved in this way from seeming too claustrophobic, illusionism is incorporated into the materials themselves. Instead of compositionally opening space up in a Cubist manner, Schwitters leaves the opening of the pictorial space to the materials.” (John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, Düsseldorf 1987, p. 232).