1887, Hanover, Germany–1948, Kendal, England

Immigrated to the UK in 1940

The experimental work that made Schwitters a key figure in German avant-garde circles also made him a target of the Nazis. In the 1930s, his contract with Hanover City Council was terminated and his work appeared in the infamous Degenerate Art exhibition. In 1937 he fled Germany for Norway to escape interrogation by the Gestapo. Three years later, as the German army advanced north, Schwitters escaped once more, arriving in Edinburgh aboard a Norwegian icebreaker. Within days of landing in 1940, he was detained and sent to an internment camp on the Isle of Man. This quintessential example of the avant-garde use of scraps of paper is an intimate gesture made for Schwitters’s friend, the artist Elsa Fraenkel (represented in the Ben Uri collection). Both would soon become refugees from Nazism. The small work layers tickets and fragments of typography to recall their journeys to Paris in the 1920s, loosening language into image and evoking a sense of travel.

Ben Uri Collection

Purchased from the family of Else Fraenkel, 2019