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Kurt
Schwitters [1887-1948]
Born
in Hanover, the only child of affluent parents,
he was a loner in his youth, plagued by epileptic attacks, introverted
and insecure, and as a student at the Dresden Academy of Art he
proved as apt as he was unimaginative.
Although his contact with Expressionist artists in Hannover in
1916 gave him more confidence to develop his own style, even his
most impressive works, such as Mountain
Graveyard, were little more than imitations
of his contemporaries.
A
major challenge came in 1918 with
the invitation to exhibit at Herwarth Walden's notorious Sturm
gallery in Berlin, for Walden had contacts with most progressive
European artists, including the Zurich Dada group.
Schwitters found further stimulus in the activities of the revolutionary
Berlin Dadaists.
The generally accepted story that Schwitters was rejected by Berlin
Dada is, however, not true. But it was Hans Arp, himself
a pioneer of collage, who first persuaded Schwitters to abandon
his sterile academic techniques.
Schwitters' first known collage, Hansi, is strongly reminiscent
of Arp's work, and soon afterwards he began making assemblages
from scraps of refuse, including one he called the Merz picture.
Subsequently he referred to all his work as Merz.
A
Sturm exhibition of his new style in
mid-1919, which showed his abstract Merz works and some whimsical
'Dada drawings' such as The Heart goes from Sugar to Coffee
caused a furore among the critics, as did his 'Anna Blume'
poem published in the same year. Schwitters thrived on public
opposition, and from 1919 to 1923 he created a succession of Merz
pictures which are now seen as his greatest contribution to twentieth
century art.
These pictures carry an inner tension that derives from the sensitive
juxtaposition of abstraction and realism, aesthetics and rubbish,
art and life, and their innate dynamism is one of the characteristics
of Merz.
Schwitters stands alone in the consummate mastery of colour, the
delicate balance of content and form and the intricate interplay
of coarse and filigree displayed in Merzbild Rossfett;
the almost minimalist Revolving, using the barest of materials,
conveys a mysterious shadowy rotating cosmos extending far beyond
the bounds of the frame: in Construction for Noble Ladies, the
precarious equilibrium of the disparate elements is stabilised
only by the side-on portrait of Schwitters' angelic and long-suffering
wife Helma.
Schwitters'
revolution came late
He was 32 at the time of the first Merz
exhibition, but Merz changed his life radically. He suddenly found
himself at the forefront of contemporary art and quickly allied
himself with the avant-garde, including various European Dada
groups, the Bauhaus, Schlemmer, Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger,
Gropius and the new generation of Contructivists from Eastern
Europe and the Netherlands, Lissitsky, Moholy-Nagy, Theo van
Doesburg.
By now his fantasy knew no bounds and over the next
decade he undertook radical experiments in such fields as abstract
drama and poetry, cabaret, typography, multimedia art, body painting,
music, photography and architecture. He published a Merz
magazine which appeared irregularly from 1923-32
and founded what was to become a successful advertising agency
in 1924.
Schwitters
was a master of subtle colour and precarious balance,
and during the twenties the influence of Constructivism, with
its clinical reliance on primary colour and clear geometrical
forms, was not always advantageous to his work.
Although a quasi-minimalist approach came naturally to him, he
experimented with it early, in pictures like Coloured Squares,
he introduced Constructivist ideas more rigorously into his work
after 1924.
The composition of the Merz pictures becomes more clear-cut, the
textures more uniform, the individual elements larger and simpler.
But luckily he never abandoned the principles of Merz, as can
be seen from the splendid Relief
with Cross and Sphere and Cicero, where the
effects of stark Constructivist colours and tight composition
are brilliantly offset by sharp curves and shadows and Schwitters'
beloved scraps of battered Merz refuse. An equally startling example
is Small Seaman's
Home, made in Holland, where Schwitters
would comb the beaches for Merz finds during his summer holidays.
For
thirteen years (1923-36)
he also worked on an extraordinary construction
that came to be known as the Merzbau; it was what we would
now call an Environment and eventually spread to eight rooms of
his house in Hannover. Its original name was the 'Cathedral
of Erotic Misery' and its contents were as shocking as anything
produced by radical young artists today.
With
the rise of National Socialism in Germany after 1929,
Schwitters found himself in serious difficulties.
As the artistic community emigrated or went into hiding, so Schwitters
was robbed of much of the impetus that was crucial to his art.
The death of his father and of Theo van Doesburg in 1931
mark the start of a new phase of his work, as Schwitters himself
makes clear in 'New Merz Picture', with its contemplative
mood and coarse dabs of colour.
The sombre restraint of Pino Antoni is likewise in sharp
contrast to the works of the exuberant early Merz period.
Schwitters kept a low profile during the Third Reich
and emigrated to Norway in January 1937, for reasons that have
never been satisfactorily explained. But the Gestapo were certainly
on his trail, and in summer 1937 his pictures were displayed at
the infamous 'Entartete Kunst'
exhibition in Munich. Clearly his return to Germany was blocked
for ever.
Depressed
at abandoning the Hannover Merzbau to an uncertain fate,
Schwitters completed a similar construction in Oslo, but in 1940
Nazi troops invaded Norway and he was forced to flee for his life.
He finally landed in England, where he was interned until November
1941.
Yet the Merz pictures of this turbulent period give little indication
of the fact that Schwitters suffered from poor health and time
and again found himself in life-threatening situations. Merzbild
Alf is often cited as an example
of his brief interest in Surrealism: it is difficult to imagine
that Spring Door, the superb Glass Flower and Merzbild
with Rainbow, with their sparks of light and swinging rhythms,
were created at a time of increasing isolation and despair for
the artist.
After
release from internment,
Schwitters lived until 1945 in bombed-out
London, where the unfamiliar surroundings gave him fresh inspiration
for Merz pictures.
He made light of his heap of problems in Difficult, echoed
the dismal fabric of wartime Britain and the blows of fate in
the ironically-named Heavy Relief, reworked the great masters
in inimitable tongue-in-cheek Merz fashion in Die heilige Nacht
and recalled the dark days of the Nazi regime in the sinister
black shapes and blood-red background of Hitler Gang, named after
a film. He was fascinated by the comics sent in letters from compatriots
in the USA and used them in his famous For Kate, a collage now
regarded as a forerunner of Pop Art.
In
1945 he moved with his young companion, Edith
Thomas, to Ambleside in
the English Lake District, where, financed by the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, he started on a new Merzbau that came to be known
as the Merz barn.
At his death he had completed only one wall, now to be found in
Newcastle University.
Sadly, no other of Schwitters extraordinary Merzbau constructions
have survived.
He died at the
age of sixty, poverty-stricken and neglected,
but in the knowledge that his work would one day be recognized
as that of a genius. As he saw, the language of Merz now finds
common acceptance and today there is scarcely an artist working
with materials other than paint who does not refer to Schwitters
in some way. In his bold and wide-ranging experiments he can be
seen as the grandfather of Pop Art, Happenings,
Concept Art, Fluxus, multimedia art and post-modernism.
Through
all the tribulations of his life, Schwitters stood
his ground with his undogmatic, non-élitist and democratic
creation of Merz, which conjured up its own magic from the rejected
and the discarded: small wonder that the Nazis found Schwitters'
art subversive and tried to eradicate it.
And in our own age of increasing extremism, his message is as
valid as it ever was.
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