Databáze uměleckých výstav v českých zemích 1820 – 1950

This exhibition of collages, held by Krasoumná jednota (Fine Arts Association) in one of its exhibition halls in Prague’s Rudolfinum at the turn of 1927, was the first solo show of Kurt Schwitters outside Germany. Schwitters had already visited Prague before this exhibition, and in the 1920s, he maintained contacts with Prague and Brno Devětsil. His first documented trip to Prague was named Anti-Dada-Merz-Reise, and Schwitters took it along with Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and Helma Schwitters in September 1921. The artists held two Dadaist literary evenings in the Urania hall [Šmejkal 1986, p. 184]. The Czech avant-garde knew and appreciated Schwitters primarily as a Dadaist poet, performer, and publisher of the experimental magazine Merz. For Karel Teige, Schwitters was “an absolute opponent of aestheticism and artifice,” whose art presented a specific branch of painting in which the artist used fragments of reality to create images. [Teige 1925, pp. 39-40]

Schwitters assembled his two-dimensional works, reliefs, and later spatial compositions from waste, small, worn-out objects, and various remnants of everyday life. His collages often feature train tickets and receipts from his travels, candy and cigarette wrappers, newspaper scraps, and all kinds of paper. He presented them as abstract works that denoted nothing but the aesthetic qualities of the materials used. Although these works contained fragments of actual objects, all the unusual material lost its original meaning by being incorporated into the composition and became a formal device. Schwitters first exhibited his collages and assemblages in Berlin in July 1919, and the following years brought nothing but fierce opposition and scathing criticism. By 1926, however, his works no longer seemed scandalous, and the provocativeness of his early Dadaist experiments had faded. For the exhibition in Prague, he selected fifty collages from 1920–1926, with works created during the most recent year dominating the collection. During this period, the influence of Constructivism grew stronger in Schwitters’s art. He moved away from the Dadaist spontaneity of his earlier creations toward a more organized arrangement of the diverse fragments, placing increasing emphasis on precise composition.

The Schwitters show at the House of Artists (Rudolfinum) ran concurrently with another three unrelated exhibitions. For Krasoumná jednota, this was a common practice in the 1920s, and the organizers would often allocate the spaces to the exhibiting artists without any exhibition plan in mind. For just under three weeks, Rudolfinum’s visitors could view a disparate cluster of shows: the exhibition of the Union of Czechoslovak Amateur Photography Clubs and portraits and landscapes by the young Austrian painter Rudolf Zeileissen as the main program, accompanied by smaller shows – Schwitters’s collages in one of the halls, and a vitrine housing puppets and arts-and-crafts objects by Nelly Winternitz. 

A preserved fragment of Schwitters’s correspondence with August Ströbel, the Krasoumná jednota secretary, helps reveal the activity behind the scenes. The letters, mostly discussing practical and organizational matters, show that the artist prepared the show himself. He selected and arranged the exhibits and, at the beginning of October 1926, sent the entire set of small-format collages from Hannover to Prague by mail in a single package. Schwitters probably also installed the artworks and, according to witnesses, attended the opening [Šmejkal 1986, p. 189]. He also authored the introductory text in the catalogue, entitled Artist and the Titles of His Works. When preparing the list of collages for the Czech version of the catalogue, the organizers struggled with translating the works’ titles, which were often highly original, and asked the artist to explain them. On October 1, 1926, Schwitters sent a letter with a commentary on the choice of titles and instructions for translation. A passage from this letter then appeared as the catalogue introduction. German compound words containing the central concept of Switters’s oeuvre, “Merz” caused equal troubles to the organizers, so the subtitle of the Prague exhibition – Merzausstellung – was omitted from the Czech version of the catalogue. The word Merzzeichnung, which Schwitters used for his collage technique, was translated somewhat confusingly as “drawing.” 

The correspondence between Schwitters and Ströbel suggests that Schwitters was also keen to organize an exhibition in Brno. He eventually began to make arrangements with the Brno Devětsil, asking the Krasoumná jednota secretary to have all the artworks packed and sent by post to Brno to the address of Bedřich Václavek after the end of the Prague show. Further documents concerning Schwitters’s communication with Brno and reasons why the show never materialized have yet to emerge from the archives. From the end of 1926, the Brno Devětsil struggled with internal problems, and the group was heading for disbandment. Schwitters later included all the collages exhibited in Prague in the catalogue of a large travelling retrospective to be held in German galleries in 1927, on the occasion of his fortieth birthday [Schwitters 1927]. An inventory of Schwitters’s artworks provides detailed information and black-and-white reproductions of 31 items from this set [Orchard – Schulz].

Reviews in the press show that visitors appreciated Schwitters’s collages for the fragments of everyday reality, which they liked to identify rather than perceiving the works as abstract compositions. The exhibition caught the interest of Artuš Černík and František Halas, both members of Devětsil, who themselves had previously gravitated towards Dadaism. Some reviewers, however, refused to consider Schwitters’s collages as works of art, although they admitted that they were engaging and aesthetically impressive. In contrast to the successful exhibition of Paul Klee’s watercolours organized by Krasoumná Jednota in March 1926, the Schwitters show mostly failed to attract lasting attention to his Merzkunst; on the contrary, the Czech avant-garde became increasingly drawn to French Surrealism. Schwitters’s intensive collaboration with Prague and Brno thus did not extend beyond 1925-1927. 

Lenka Pastýříková     

Works Cited

Orchard–Schulz 2000–2003: Karin Orchard – Isabel Schulz, Kurt Schwitters: catalogue raisonné, sv. 1: 1905–1922, vol. 2: 1923–1936, Hannover – Ostfildern-Ruit 2000–2003

Schwitters 1927: Kurt Schwitters, Katalog, Merz 1927, no. 20, pp. 98–105

Šmejkal 1986: František Šmejkal, Kurt Schwitters a Praha, Umění XXXIV, 1986, no. 6, pp. 184–191

Teige 1925–1926: Karel Teige, Vojenská přehlídka dada, Pásmo II, 1925–1926, no. 3, pp. 38–40

Further Reading

František Šmejkal, Kurt Schwitters in Prag, in: Kurt–Schwitters–Almanach II, 1983, pp. 109–139

Ludvík Kundera, DADA v Čechách a na Moravě, Bulletin Moravské galerie v Brně LII, 1996, pp. 15–23

Archival Sources

Correspondence of Kurt Schwitters and August Ströbel, Archive of the National Gallery in Prague, fonds Krasoumná jednota

Anonym, Im Kunstverein für Böhmen, Deutsche Zeitung Bohemia C, 1927, n. 1, 1. 1., p. 31

F. M., Výstava Karla (sic!) Schwitterse, Rozpravy Aventina II, 1926–1927, n. 9, pp. 106–107