Words: Gentleman's Journal
Kurt Schwitters is not a household name and indeed is not familiar to many serious art lovers, yet he is one of the most fascinating artists of the 20th century, who produced some of the most astonishing and beguiling work in the history of art.
Schwitters in Britain at Tate Britain is the first major exhibition to examine the late work of the German artist. The exhibition focuses on his period in Britain, i.e. from his arrival in an internment camp on the Isle of Man in 1940 to his death in Cumbria in 1948. He is indeed one of the major artists of European Modernism. It is more surprising that he is so little known in the UK, as he produced some of his best work whilst in exile in England.
In many ways, he is the quintessential artist, who used his imagination and eye to transform worthless rubbish into astonishing works of art – an artist who, despite persecution, exile, imprisonment, poverty, ill-health, a lack of access to paint or expensive materials, used whatever he found just lying around on the ground or in his house – bits of wood, rubber, plastic, wire, feathers, bus tickets, bits of newspapers and sweet wrappers, even bone and dried fruit – and produced utterly beautiful art works, that speak more eloquently and poetically about his life and his time, than any Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin ever could.
Mixed media collage made by Schwitters during his stay in Britain (1940-48)
Schwitters was a significant figure in European Dadaism who invented the concept of Merz – ‘the combination, for artistic purposes of all conceivable materials’. Whether those materials were string, cotton wool or a pram wheel, Schwitters considered them to be the equal to the conventional medium of paint.
A knowledge of Schwitters’ life helps make sense of his work. In Germany, throughout the 1920s and 30s, he had been both a successful businessman and a somewhat eccentric artist, flirting with various art movements – from Expressionism, Mysticism, Russian Constructivism to De Stijl, but in many ways remaining a maverick, an outsider.
His most outlandish and madcap project was the Merzbau, a vast sculptural construction, which took over part of the artist’s home and studio in Hanover, begun in 1923 and unfinished when he left Germany in December 1937. The Merzbau was in effect an elaborate autobiographical ‘growth’ of interconnecting grottoes, in which pieces of friends’ clothing, hair and even the artist’s own bottled urine were placed along with a host of other bizarre objects in compartments and behind secret panels. It was destroyed by an Allied bomb in 1943. Throughout the rest of his life, the idea of building or re-building a Merzbau was a relentless, almost crazed, obsession.
In 1937 his work was condemned as ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi government, so Schwitters fled his native Hanover for Norway. He last saw his wife Helma when she visited him in 1939: she returned to Germany, dying of cancer in 1944.
In 1940 he boarded the last ship to leave Norway before Nazi occupation. On arrival at the Scottish port of Leith, he was detained as an enemy alien. He was one of many German artists and intellectuals interned on the Isle of Man during World War II. Prison is prison, but it is heartening to think that the British authorities were civilized enough to organize a varied cultural programme for and with the detainees, including regular talks on philosophy and art, given by professors from Oxford and Cambridge. In the camp Schwitters painted views of outbuildings and portraits of fellow detainees and officials, participated in group exhibitions and gave ‘sound poetry’ performances, (involving humming and chanting nonsensical sounds) which most listeners then and now, not surprisingly, found unbearable.
Mixed media collage made by Schwitters during his stay in Britain (1940-48)
Released in 1941, he became involved with the London art scene, engaging with British artists such as Ben Nicholson and the highly influential art critic, Herbert Read, who championed Schwitters’ work.
Finding the capital expensive, weakened by strokes and remembering his impression that Cumbria was a bit like Norway (“but better”), he left London in 1945 with his new companion, Edith Thomas, known as ‘Wantee’ (as she constantly asked guests if they wanted tea!) for a new life in the Lake District.
Cut off from the centres of the European avant-garde and with International Modernism beleaguered by rising tides of nationalism across Europe, Schwitters’ work in exile became increasingly organic, with natural forms and muted colours replacing the mass-produced ephemera of previous years.
After the war, his friend Käte Steinitz started to send letters back to him from the United States, where she had emigrated in 1936. She described life in the emerging consumer society, and wrapped the letters in pages of comics to give a flavour of the new world, encouraging him to ‘Merz’ this ephemera, the result of which was a sequence of proto-pop art pictures such as For Käte, 1947. He thought of migrating to the USA and had advanced plans for exhibitions in New York: many of the works at this time incorporate postage stamps, photos of ships and other ephemera suggesting travel and migration.
Mixed media collage made by Schwitters during his stay in Britain (1940-48)
Plagued by health problems in his remaining years, including temporary blindness in 1946 and a number of strokes, Schwitters had a fatal heart attack in 1948 – the day before he was granted British citizenship. He was buried in Ambleside – although his body was later disinterred and reburied in Hanover.
It is thrilling in this show to see so many works (150) together: collages, assemblages and sculptures, many from museums around the world, many from private collections, and many shown in the UK for the first time in over 30 years. Even the happy few who know and love Schwitters will be delighted to see so many unfamiliar works. Visitors will see that, though his reputation rests on his collages and art works from found objects, he was capable of producing very accomplished realistic oil portraits and landscapes.
Mixed media collage made by Schwitters during his stay in Britain (1940-48)
One does not usually study the labels at exhibitions with much interest, but here one is fascinated to know what materials he used: Old Master prints, twigs, bone, dried plums, pingpong balls, broken glass, porcelain shards, porridge, oil paint made from olive oil from sardine tins, bits of linoleum torn from the floor etc. Moreover, the titles are fascinating, as they often refer to a fragment of text in the work. Merz, which is a key word and concept in his work (‘the combination, for artistic purposes of all conceivable materials’) is a word Schwitters invented, based on a 1918 work using a fragment of text, which originally read ‘Commerz’. It is also part of the German word Schmerz (‘pain’). Sometimes, the titles are misleading, like Ox, which has nothing to do with Ox, but more likely is part of the word Oxford or Oxo. Sometimes, they sound like something in a foreign language. Usually, one has to forensically search the work to see where the title comes from. As many of the works are owned by German or foreign museums and collectors, one wonders what they make of names instantly recognizable to most English people, such Bassett’s or Quality Street. Part of the fascination of Schwitters’ work is their referencing of British popular culture and his playfulness with words. He was as drawn to language and words, as to typography and advertising (he had run advertising and typography agencies in the 1920s). One also remembers how, during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s, Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling out words at random from a hat.
Though the works are not all successful and may even seem repetitive to newcomers to his art, this is an exhibition worth pouring over. Each work is a sort of palimpsest, built layer upon layer, and like a worn medieval manuscript, requires careful scrutiny, with parts tantalizingly indecipherable. They are poignant, elegiac little autobiographies. (I should stress that photographs do not do the works justice.)
In conclusion, Schwitters’ time in Britain was a time of personal loss, poverty, ill health and struggle for success but it was also an immensely fertile period for a man with his extraordinarily inventive imagination. So many artists have been inspired by him, including Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and even, interestingly but not obviously, Damien Hirst. He has been referred to as the grandfather of Pop Art, Happenings, Concept Art, Fluxus, Poubellisme, multimedia art and post-modernism. Poet, painter, priest or fruitcake? Go see and decide.
Portrait of fellow internee Fred Uhlman (c 1940)
Schwitters in Britain is organized by Tate Britain and the Sprengel Museum Hannover in cooperation with the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung, Hannover. 30 January – 12 May 2013
By Terence Rodrigues
Terence Rodrigues, besides being an author and critic, is an international art consultant, advising private clients on art sales and acquisitions. For further information contact him on +44 (0)7905 474 394
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