“Luke is particularly adept at operationalizing the artist’s writings to support a compelling interpretation of individual artworks and to subvert the idea that study of his late work (and perhaps such work by many artists) is unproductive. . . . Recommended.”

Choice

“[O]ffers a refreshing critical perspective. . . . Luke achieves a lucid reappraisal of [Schwitters’s] work of exile.”

Times Higher Education

“Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile is an excellent study of a deeply fascinating artist, and has important things to say about the history of modernism.”
 

Visual Studies

“Luke’s important new study of Kurt Schwitters’s late work provides a much-needed reassessment of an important modernist artist who spent the last eleven years of his life in situations of political dislocation and exile. . . . This publication aptly testifies to her familiarity with heretofore little-known elements of his archive and the considerable light they throw upon the evolution of his work and thought in the last two decades of his life.”

Burlington Magazine

“Compelling. . . . There may be no way of speaking of Schwitters in exile without pathos. . . . Luke’s study, always restrained, precise, and scholarly, demonstrates that pathos can, under certain circumstances, be put to analytical and critical use.”

CAA Reviews

“A surprising and penetrating account of ‘Merz,’ this book gives Schwitters his rightful place at the very heart of the theorization of modernism and offers one of the most illuminating accounts I have come across of the implications of his practice for the intersections of art and identity.”

Michael White, University of York

“This is a powerful and exceptionally articulate treatment of a complex and fascinating artist whose work is diverse and often eccentric, but also important and extraordinarily influential in its time and after. No other scholar has granted Schwitters’s late work the depth of appreciation and importance that Luke accords the output of this period. She brings to this project a keen sensitivity to the formal issues that lie at the heart of Schwitters’s work and ideas across his entire career. Her book makes a significant contribution to the literature on Schwitters and should be read by scholars and students of both modern and postmodern art.”

Nancy J. Troy, Stanford University

“This book joins rigorous scholarship and rich close readings, providing readers with a compelling and comprehensive new interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’s artistic, literary, and theoretical work. But it does much more than that. Questioning the art-historical preference for beginnings, it looks at Dada, constructivism, and other crucial moments of avant-garde art from the viewpoint of the aging and exiled artist. This change of perspective offers a lesson of far-reaching significance for our increasingly dis- tant take on twentieth-century art: that modernism itself persevered and thrived thanks to engaging deeply with its own increasingly remote past.”

Ralph Ubl, University of Basel