AVANT-GARDE AND ADVERTISING

The exhibition Kurt Schwitters. Avant-Garde and Advertising seeks to highlight jointly what at first glance would appear to be two divergent aspects of the work of Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948), one of the foremost figures of the European avant-garde in the last century: on the one hand, his collages—a technique of which he was a true master, along with Picasso, Hans Arp, László Moholy-Nagy and Hannah Höch—and, on the other, his graphic design, a facet of his legacy that is much less familiar to the general public. To this end, the exhibition presents several of his celebrated collages from the period spanning the 1920s and the 1940s alongside an uninterrupted string of his work in graphic design and typography, with numerous and varied examples, ranging from books, posters, advertising pamphlets, magazines, ads for the press, letterheads, and printed matter for banks and businesses or for the post.