Relief mit Gelbem Viereck (Relief with Yellow Rectangle), in oil, plaster, wood and metal on panel, measuring 2ft 2in x 18in (65 x 46cm), was inherited by Ernst Schwitters, the artist's son, passed through the Marlborough and Gmurzynska galleries in the 1970s, and was latterly owned by a collector from Atlanta, Georgia. It is mounted on a white acrylic board measuring 3ft 3in x 2ft 9in (1m x 83cm).
The date of the work was the cause of some uncertainty. Although it was signed in red KS 28 at the bottom right, Lempertz listed its first known appearance at a Berlin exhibition in 1926, which was followed by a travelling show of Schwitters' early work that took it to several German cities in 1927.
This suggested that the work here was in fact the picture done in 1924 and originally entitled Merz-Relief mit schragem Gelb (Relief with Yellow Slant), but reworked by Schwitters in 1928, hence the date. But Lempertz also cited the opinion of Ernst Schwitters who, on the contrary, claimed that this was a second, almost identical version of the 1924 original produced by his father in 1928.
The work remained in the public eye in Weimar Germany, featuring in exhibitions in Munich in 1929 and Hanover in 1931, but thereafter was not shown again until 1956, when it travelled from Hanover (where Schwitters' self-designed Merzbau home was destroyed in 1943) to Bern, Amsterdam and Brussels. Most recently it could be seen at the Schwitters/Arp exhibition at the Basel Kumstmuseum last year.
Schwitters' first collages date from 1918 and were first shown at the Berlin gallery Der Sturm in 1919. He was strongly influenced by the Constructivists he encountered at the First Russian Art Exhibition at the Galerie van Diemen in Berlin in 1922, and also, according to Arp, "he especially admired the work of Van Doesburg and Mondrian", whose influence is evident in the work sold at Lempertz.
The Schwitters was one of a dozen lots to clear €100,000 at a lively sale. As at Berlin's Villa Grisebach in November (see ATG No 1671, January 9, 2005), Constructivists were out in force and selling well, led by an El Lissitzky Untitled (c.1922) at €310,000 (£221,00), and an unexpectedly high €132,000 (£94,300) for Henryk Berlewi's monochrome 1924 gouache Kontrasty Mekanofakture, first shown (and presumably commissioned or inspired by) the Austro-Daimler Autosalon held in Warsaw in 1924.
Other notable prices included Kandinsky's 1924 ink and watercolour Schweres Fallen that fetched €370,000 (£264,200) and a brightly coloured work from his early figurative days, Kornhausten-Murnau (1908), which rated €420,000 (£300,000). Auguste Herbin's fauve view of a Corsican seafront, Quais du Port de Bastia (1907), fetched €170,000 (£121,400).
By Simon Hewitt
