Kurt Schwitters, The World in Chaos: a blockbuster retrospective at the Picasso Museum

Co-organized with New York's MoMA, the Kurt Schwitters. The Chaos-World. 1918–1948 exhibition arrives at the Musée national Picasso-Paris from October 6, 2026 to February 7, 2027. More than 300 paintings, sculptures and collages trace the career of this major figure in modern art.

A first in France in more than thirty years! From October 6, 2026 to February 7, 2027, the Musée national Picasso-Paris will present Kurt Schwitters. The Chaos World. 1918-1948, a retrospective devoted to the German artist in Paris’s 3rd arrondissement. Born from a collaboration between the Paris institution and the MoMA in New York, the show brings together more than 300 works and archives to rediscover this iconoclastic creator, a pioneer of assemblage and recycled art.

Painter, sculptor, poet, typographer and performer, Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) stands out as an extraordinary “one-man band” of an artist. On the fringe of Dada, constructivism, and geometric abstraction, he forged his own artistic current, dubbing it Merz. Haunted by the scars of war, the creator transformed discarded matter into poetic, harmonious compositions by reimagining everyday scraps—newspapers, tickets, scraps of wood, strings, and rubbish—into artful forms.

A Creative Dialogue with Pablo Picasso and the Paris Art Scene

Rather than a linear journey, the exhibition emphasizes cross-media exploration and highlights the formal correspondences between Kurt Schwitters and Pablo Picasso. The two contemporaries shared a common obsession with experimentation, the deconstruction of traditional codes, and the introduction of real objects into the realm of painting and sculpture.

Viewed as a "degenerate" artist by the Nazi regime, Schwitters went into exile in 1937, fleeing from Hanover to Norway and then the United Kingdom. Despite extremely precarious living conditions and the destruction of his works, he pressed on in his pursuit of total art, later influencing Pop Art and American neo-Dada, beginning with Robert Rauschenberg.

The Merzbau: Recreating a legendary, vanished artwork

One of the highlights of the tour is the presentation of an exceptional reconstruction of the Merzbau. An absolute masterpiece by the artist and a fundamental milestone of modern art, this organic architectural structure with interlocking volumes originally occupied eight rooms of his Hanover home, before being destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943.

Thanks to the work of set designer Peter Bissegger and the artist's son, Ernst Schwitters, realized in the 1980s from period photographs, Parisians can immerse themselves directly in this iconic spatial installation.

Around the Exhibition: An International Conference at the Sorbonne

To extend the experience, the Musée Picasso in Paris teams up with the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and the Sprengel Museum in Hanover. On 12 and 13 November 2026, an international conference titled "Kurt Schwitters: Singular, Plural" will be held at the Sorbonne to examine the enduring legacy of his work, its ties to France, and the preservation of his hybrid assemblages.

This page may contain AI-assisted elements, more information here.