The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA Highlights, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, revised 2004, originally published 1999, p. 115

This highly animated picture is dominated by rectangular pieces of paper that cover the surface of the work. Schwitters created the illusion of depth by placing those papers with darker components behind those that are lighter in aspect. The brightest piece of paper, in the center of the composition, shows an eye-catching cluster of red cherries and the printed German and French words for the fruit.

In the winter of 1918–19 Schwitters had collected bits of newspaper, candy wrappers, and other debris, and began making the collages and assemblages for which he is best known today. The Cherry Picture belongs to a group of these works he called Merz, a nonsensical word that he made up by cutting a scrap from a newspaper: the second syllable of the German word Kommerz, or commerce.

By 1921 Schwitters had been painting seriously for ten years, largely in different naturalistic styles. In doing so, he learned how all art was based on measurement and adjustment and the manipulation of a variable but finite number of pictorial elements. He never forgot these lessons, which form a bridge between his earlier, representational work and the purely formal manipulation of found materials in the Merz pictures.

John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1985, pp. 68–69

Schwitters started to make [a group of both painted and unpainted constructions] around 1922. These...are clearly so different in character from the assemblages that they deserve separate discussion. The latest works he made that properly belong with assemblages are a small group of pictures of 1920 and 1921 which break entirely with the concentric or diagonal forms...in favor of grid format. Some are not especially successful, but Das Kirschbild (The Cherry Picture) of 1921—the finest of this group—is one of Schwitters' most inspired pictures. (Its title puns on "Kurtchen," Schwitters' pet name.) It uses some high-relief and bulky objects but is dominated by rectangular-shaped pieces of carefully graded relief and size which line up with, and to some extent duplicate, the proportions of the picture edges. The pieces all appear to have breathing-space in the form of darker and more irregularly shaped fragments behind them. In consequence, the picture stays open in feeling, its planes seeming to reach for each other across the illusion of an expansive but taut space. The materials seem to control and to direct the flow of the pictorial space; they exist as materials and are used as materials, and not as if they were something else. The very natural and intuitive freedom yet sense of ordered containment manifested in this wonderful picture is like that of the small collages of this period.