Collage: Revolution from Refuse

"So that one cannot say, 'the poor fellow had no inkling of how important he was,' I know full well that the time will come for me and all the other important personalities of the abstract movement when we will influence an entire generation."

The speaker was German-born Kurt Schwitters; the year, 1931. Seventeen years later, he died in exile in England, all but unknown. As a current retrospective of 163 works in Manhattan's Marlborough-Gerson Gallery shows, he was never a major figure in the abstract movement, but he raised the art of collage from a scissors-and-glue pastime into a serious, if topical, medium that makes him seem fresh again in a season dominated by pop.

Within a Cubistic Grotto. "The waste of the world becomes my art," Schwitters scribbled on the back of one collage. Beginning with his 1919 encounter with the Dada movement, he made art out of stamps, trademarks, slogans, coins, buttons, torn-up photographs and headlines, used for punning or oblique meanings. He hunted bric-a-brac in the streets, even carried a small screwdriver, which he once was caught using to detach a "Rauchen Verboten" sign from the back of a streetcar.