Kurt Schwitters. Le chaos-monde. 1918-1948

Musée national Picasso-Paris

The Musée national Picasso-Paris presents, from October 6, 2026 to February 7, 2027, the exhibition « Kurt Schwitters. Le chaos-monde. 1918-1948 », a major retrospective of an artist apart within the Dada movement, Constructivism and the German abstract scene, who has not been shown in France for more than thirty years. Bringing together more than three hundred works and documents - paintings, sculptures, assemblages, collages, drawings, notebooks, photographs, books and archives - the exhibition offers an immersion into a universe of exceptional formal and conceptual richness. It also highlights the echoes linking Schwitters's work to that of Picasso, particularly in their relationship to experimentation, assemblage and the transformation of everyday materials. The work of the German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) traces a singular path within the art of the first half of the 20th century, grounded in the collective experience of the destruction of war and the iconoclastic and formal reinvention characteristic of the radical German scene of the 1920s and 1930s. Painter, assembler, poet, musician, sculptor, typographer, editor of a magazine and organizer of events, this anarchist "one-man-orchestra" artist, whose work merges with life, defies categories and appears irreducible to any attempt at classification. Schwitters, at the initiative of unprecedented collaborations with Dada and the Constructivists, formulating his own movement Merz, is among the essential figures of the geometric abstraction movement, participating in several historic events in Paris in the context of the interwar period. He is one of those creators who, like his contemporary Pablo Picasso or other figures within the Dada constellation, helped to radically redefine the boundaries of art. He conceives his works from waste and debris transformed into "harmonious" matter and develops an Kurt Schwitters beim Vortrag der Ursonate, London, 1944, Merzbau, Kurt Schwitters organic architecture of angles and recesses within his own house, the Merzbau. He also transposes the collage technique into the field of poetry, invents and performs the prodigious Ursonate, a sonata of primitive sounds, creates a magazine, typographic advertising slogans, assemblages, sculptures...

Source: Paris Open Data ↗