- Artist
- Kurt Schwitters 1887–1948
- Medium
- Oil paint, wood, cotton wool and rubber
- Dimensions
- Object: 375 × 315 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Bequeathed by Eugene and Penelope Rosenberg 2015
- Reference
- T14301
Summary
Untitled (BLACK POWDER) 1945–7 is a wall-mounted, painted assemblage constructed primarily out of wood. It comprises two painted wooden backboards onto which is mounted a thin section of tree trunk, which provides a platform for an eclectic combination of found objects, including cotton wool and the paper casing of a shotgun cartridge inscribed ‘BLACK POWDER’, from which the work takes its name. The support is painted with a variety of geometrical shapes including red and green triangles in the lower right corner, a white semi-circle at the right edge and an area of vibrant blue in the upper right corner intersected by red and ochre forms. The left side of the backboard is painted dark blue. The section of tree trunk also has painted areas of green and blue around its edges, which create a contrast with the unpainted central area of the tree trunk and the natural state of the objects mounted on it. It also creates an ambiguity between the three dimensional elements in the assemblage and the painted areas, which together appear to unfurl outward in a spiral motion from the whorls of the tree trunk at the centre of the work.
Untitled (BLACK POWDER) was made while the German artist Kurt Schwitters was living in Ambleside in Cumbria at a time when he was inspired by the landscape of the Lake District and increasingly incorporated natural objects into his assemblages. The shotgun cartridge paper suggests a link with the Cylinders Estate, originally part of the Elterwater Gunpowder Works at Elterwater near Ambleside, where Schwitters made his final installation, the Merz Barn 1947–8 – a plaster construction of biomorphic shapes painted and embedded with found natural objects. Schwitters’s assemblages and sculptures of this period demonstrate the same concerns found in this site-specific installation, which both responded to and incorporated elements of the landscape around it. The strong connection between Untitled (BLACK POWDER) and the Merz Barn site is confirmed by its presence in a photograph of c.1948 where it appears with a group of works displayed on the exterior wall of the Merz Barn and the grass outside (Cardinal and Webster 2011, p.81).
Schwitters defined his theory of ‘Merz’ in 1919: ‘The word Merz denotes essentially the combination of all conceivable materials for artistic purposes, and technically the principle of equal evaluation of the individual materials … A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint.’ (Quoted in Kurt Schwitters, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 1985, p.13.) These principles continued to govern his work in Britain, where he lived from 1940 until his death in 1948, and his assemblages combined found objects and painted areas, giving them equal status in the composition. Schwitters also saw the use of painted surfaces in sculpture as a way of combining painting and sculpture into one art, challenging the traditional boundaries that separated the two practices, and a similar motivation is in play in his use of painted areas in his assemblages. In November 1945 he wrote to Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, describing this practice: ‘I modellized the colour and form of the surface with paint, so that modellizing and painting became only one art.’(Quoted in Megan Luke, Kurt Schwitters: Space Image, Exile, Chicago and London 2014, p.157.)
Further reading
Karin Orchard and Isabel Shulz (eds.), Kurt Schwitters: Catalogue Raisonné, Ostfilden-Ruit 2006, vol.3, no.3141, p.456.
Roger Cardinal and Gwendolen Webster, Kurt Schwitters, Ostfildern-Ruit 2011, p.81.
Emma Chambers and Karin Orchard (eds.), Schwitters in Britain, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2013, p.157.
Emma Chambers
January 2015
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