Kurt Schwitters

Exhibition at the Musée Picasso, Paris, 6 October 2026 – 7 February 2027

The work of the German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) charts a unique path within the art of the first half of the 20th century, rooted in the collective experience of the destruction wrought by war and the iconoclastic, plastic reinvention characteristic of the radical German art scene of the 1920s and 1930s. A painter, assemblage artist, poet, musician, sculptor, typographer, magazine editor and event organiser, this anarchist ‘one-man band’ of an artist—whose work is inextricably linked to his life—defies categorisation and defies any attempt to pigeonhole him. He ranks among the key figures of the geometric abstraction movement, having taken part in several historic exhibitions in Paris during the interwar period.

This catalogue of the first retrospective dedicated to Schwitters in France since 1994 brings together over three hundred works and documents – paintings, sculptures, assemblages, collages, drawings, sketchbooks, photographs, books and archives. It offers an immersion in a world of exceptional formal and conceptual richness and highlights the connections linking Schwitters’ work to that of Picasso, particularly in their approach to experimentation, assemblage and the transformation of everyday materials.