Gathering close to eighty assemblages, collages, lithographs, reliefs, and sculptures made between 1918 and 1947, as well as a partial replica of the Merzbau installation, Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage is the first large-scale retrospective in the United States of Schwitters’s work since John Elderfeld’s 1985 Museum of Modern Art retrospective. Here at the Berkeley Art Museum, where I saw it, it is also the first big retrospective of his work to reach the West Coast. Isabel Schulz, coeditor of Schwitters’s catalogue raisonné, curator of the Kurt Schwitters Archive, and executive director of the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, co-curated the exhibition with Josef Helfenstein, the director of the Menil Collection, which also sponsored the show.

The exhibition is a marvelous vehicle for Schwitters’s works from both the Menil Collection and the Sprengel Museum, which, though accompanied by works from public and private collections in Europe and the United States, constitute the clear majority of the pieces. It is also a show with a thesis, given in the keywords of its title: color and collage. The notion is that Schwitters’s interest in color and material animated his work in paint and collage. As a thesis, it is serviceable without being entirely convincing or, for me at least, compelling. Unsurprisingly, the best works speak for themselves, and as a group are entirely refreshing, easily recalling Schwitters’s strengths (and weaknesses) as a major, significantly original twentieth-century artist.

Born in Hanover in 1887, Schwitters was part of a revolutionary generation of modern artists. His talents developed slowly, through academic training and work as an industrial draftsman, and he explored both traditional styles of painting and, in rapid succession, the formal innovations of his era—Expressionism, Cubism, Abstraction, Dada—before discovering, in the immediate ruinous aftermath of the First World War, a style that he could call his own. Schwitters derived the term Merz from an early collage in that new style. It was a fragment of the words Commerz und Privatbank (or commercial bank), cut up and recast through collage. “The term Merz,” he wrote, “essentially means combining all conceivable materials for artistic purposes . . . treating all of them with equal respect” (as quoted in the accompanying exhibition catalogue, 52). Merz, then, would be a style of fragmentation and synthesis, a search for linkages and points of intersection between radically distinct objects and images, papers, colors, found scraps of material, and eventually all manner of things. Schwitters’s self-proclaimed goal was to “create connections, if possible between everything in the world” (Leah Dickerman, Dada: Zurich, Berlin, Hannover, Cologne, New York, Paris, Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2005, 163). This grand ambition distinguishes Schwitters’s essentially assimilative work from the essentially disjunctive works of various Dadaists. Schwitters’s faith, however, in the assimilative power of aesthetic creation is one reason why we are talking about his work today.

The Merz pictures and related reliefs and assemblages make up the majority of the pieces in this show. In keeping with the intensive nature of Schwitters’s detail-oriented process, they range in size from a few inches to only a few feet. What the works lack in overall size, they make up for in craft, composition, and materials. The earliest pieces on display are from 1918, the first year that Schwitters began to experiment with Cubist- and Dada-inspired styles of collage. The next decade of works is well represented, as is the final decade of Schwitters’s life with works made in exile in Norway and England in the 1940s.

The thesis of Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage encourages viewers to examine the role of color in assemblages like Ja-Was? Bild (Yes-What? Picture (1920)) where murky greens and blues are animated by elemental and vaguely anatomical shapes. But the scraps and fragments of paper-matter and other materials galvanize attention in assemblage after assemblage: painted surfaces, fragments of colored paper, heavily corrugated cardboard, newspaper, photographs, tea and cigarette wrappers, used envelopes. Die heilige Nacht, von Antonio Allegri, gen. Correggio, worked through by Kurt Schwitters (1947) is a reproduction of Allegri’s copy of Correggio’s painting modified by Schwitters. Other materials are still more textural: gauze, netting, cellophane, a piece of a record, a worn bristle brush, a feather, an empty Kodachrome slide case, fabrics, broken scissors, hair. Almost everywhere in these compositions abstraction and objecthood compete, held together by a tension that is the essence of his art.

Captions call out Schwitters’s influence on Robert Rauschenberg, though for viewers familiar with Rauschenberg’s works, that influence is obvious and unmistakable. Rauschenberg first encountered Schwitters’s collages in a show organized by Marcel Duchamp at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York. He and Jasper Johns soon became devotees. Completing the circle, Johns lent one of the pieces to the current show—a small collage entitled Für Henry Cowell (For Henry Cowell) from 1928. Cowell was a Berkeley-based composer who inspired Schwitters and taught John Cage. Ellsworth Kelly also lent two pieces. These connections are welcome in a show devoted to the art of relation.

Among the things we do not see here, it is important to remember that even though he promoted and became famous for his Merz works in collage, sculpture, and poetry, Schwitters continued to paint pictures, landscapes, and portraits in traditional styles right up until the end of his life. None of these admittedly minor works are presented, and this is perhaps as it should be. The focus here is on his collage works, including reliefs, a few sculptures, and a replica of his Merzbau.

The famous Merzbau was an environmental installation built by Schwitters in his home in Hanover between 1923 and 1933. In 1983, at the request of curator Harald Szeemann, and working with the extensive cooperation of Kurt Schwitters’s son, Ernst, Swiss stage designer Peter Bissegger constructed the replica of the Merzbau included in this show. The replica is typically housed at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. The real Merzbau had been destroyed by Allied bombs in 1943. (Schwitters himself had fled the city—and the Nazis—in 1938.) Bissegger and Ernst Schwitters worked primarily from a few black-and-white photographs of the installation taken in the 1930s and from Ernst’s memories of playing in the structure as it was under construction. Reportedly, Ernst was particularly helpful in recalling the few elements of color that are in the replica.

Although interesting, the asymmetrical, contorted spaces of the replica feel decidedly sterile—an almost ghostly, whitewashed version of what once was. It is all too easy to recall that the original sprawled across seven or more rooms in the Schwitters’s household, not just one, and that its forms had been built up over more than fifteen years, its nooks and crannies crowded with assemblages, its surfaces collaged by Schwitters and friends, like Hannah Höch, often only to be plastered over or completely recast. The replica is accompanied by a short video piece by Mona Caron depicting its reconstruction at the Berkeley Art Museum for the show. A similar gesture saw Schwitters’s recording of his Ursonate (1932) included in a performance by artist and musician Seth Horvitz in the gallery space on the evening of September 2, 2011. The idea, it seems, was to collage Schwitters into local, twenty-first-century media and performance art and art-related gallery events.

When on view at the Princeton University Art Museum, the exhibition was supplemented by archival material from Princeton University’s Firestone Library and Marquand Library, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, including an issue of Schwitters’s journal Merz (1923–32), a first edition of his book of poems Anna Blume, Dichtungen (1919), and various Dada periodicals and print matter from the 1920s. The absence of these materials, or materials like them, at the Berkeley Art Museum was strongly felt, in particular as interest in Schwitters’s typographic and other experimental design work has increased since the last major exhibition of his other works.

This show included nothing of Schwitters’s voluminous written work beyond quotes in gallery signage, and little beyond the sampled use of his recorded Ursonate to suggest his activities as a performer, and thus circumscribed Schwitters’s contribution to twentieth century art to the visual field. Furthermore, however inadvertently, the replica of the Merzbau was located on a lower floor on the other side of the museum, as if it was the work of a different artist.

This complaint is ultimately a quibble with an exhibition that presents a collection of marvelous works and that is organized around a thesis—color and collage—that, for good or ill, necessarily excludes or at least deemphasizes a great deal of Schwitters’s artistic production. The complaint arises only in light of the attention merited by these other areas of Schwitters’s output and only against the absence of another, more comprehensive and holistic gathering of his work.