There are artists who, although not perhaps of the very highest order, nonetheless define issues and create a vision so central to the aesthetic dilemmas of their time that they come to occupy a place and to exert an influence out of all proportion to the scale of their actual achievement. Kurt Schwitters, whose work is currently the subject of a major retrospective exhibition, is a figure of this sort.[1] At once immensely gifted and possessed of a quirky, original intelligence, he was also curiously limited in the principal endeavors of his career. Schwitters’s limitations, moreover, were neither inadvertent nor involuntary. They were deliberately chosen, and remained crucial to what he achieved. His special quality is therefore to be found almost as much in what he refused as in what he embraced. He is one of the authentic “little masters” of the modern movement, yet owing to the circumstances of his career—especially his association with Dada—he is an artist fatally easy to misconstrue. The fact is, without some grasp of Schwitters’s quarrel with Dada—and of what it was in Dada that he refused—his work can hardly be understood. It might even be said that without some grasp of that quarrel, Dada itself cannot be fully understood.

In this respect, as in others, the exhibition organized by John Elderfield at the Museum of Modern Art has been something of a landmark in the history of the artist’s reputation. Although the exhibition, which numbered well over two hundred items,