ABSTRACT
In the introduction to the Twentieth Century German Art catalogue, the involvement of the exhibited artists was explicitly denied. As the London plans got under way in late 1937, Charlotte Weidler had contacted the painter Max Pechstein to identify his most important collectors outside Germany. The fact that Bild mit goldenem Ohr was only exhibited in Kurt Schwitters's home town of Hanover prior to 1938, and the fact of his wife's shipments to Lysaker during 1937, raise the possibility that the work was not sold following its completion, and that it followed the artist into his Norwegian exile. Schwitters's text also illustrated a number of more specifically personal concerns, however. Though Schwitters's text made no reference to the German campaign against 'degenerate' art, his attempts to defend abstraction in this way can be interpreted as his own implicit attack against National Socialist cultural policy.
