The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition and Innovation (1993)

Characterizing Schwitters’s work as the product of the deep social and political crisis of the Weimar Republic, Dietrich challenges the prevalent outlook that twentieth-century art can be reduced to a revolutionary struggle of avant-garde artists against an entrenched artistic tradition. The Collages of Kurt Schwitters argues for a more nuanced view, in which revolutionary art forms are exposed as containing much that is traditional and, indeed, reactionary.