Kurt Schwitters

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Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters, London 1944
Birth name Kurt Schwitters
Born June 20, 1887(1887-06-20)
Hannover
Died January 8, 1948 (aged 60)
Kendal
Nationality German
Training Dresden Academy
Movement Merz
Works Das Undbild, 1919
Patrons Herwarth Walden

Kurt Schwitters (20 June 1887 - 8 January 1948) was a German painter who was born in Hannover, Germany.

Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dadaism, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his Collages, called Merz Pictures.

Contents

[edit] Early Influences And The Beginnings Of Merz

Das Undbild, 1919
Das Undbild, 1919

After studying art at the Dresden Academy, 1909-14, Schwitters started his artistic career as a post-impressionist. As the First World War progressed, however, his work became darker, gradually developing a distinctive expressionist tone. Expressionism was a predominantly German artistic movement best exemplified by Die Brücke, and by the paintings of Emil Nolde and Ernst Kirchner in particular. In 1918, however, his art was to change dramatically as a direct consequence of Germany's economic, political and military collapse at the end of the First World War.

"In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready....Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been."[1]

Whilst Schwitters still created work in an expressionist style into 1919 (and would continue to paint realist pictures up to his death in 1948), the first abstract collages would appear in 1918, which Schwitters dubbed Merz after a fragment of found text, from the sentence Commerz Und Privatbank in his picture Das Merzbild, Winter 1918-19.[2][3] By the end of 1919 he was to become famous, after his first one-man exhibition at Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm gallery, June 1919, and the publication in August of the poem An Anna Blume (usually translated as 'To Anna Flower', or 'To Eve Blossom'), a dadaist non-sensical love poem.

Schwitters spent most of the war working as a technical draftsman in a factory just outside Hannover. He was drafted into the 73rd Hannoverian Regiment in March 1917, but exempted as unfit in June of the same year. By his own account, his time as a draftsman influenced his later work, using Machines as metaphors of human activity.

"In the war [at the machine factory at Wülfen] I discovered my love for the wheel and recognized that machines are abstractions of the human spirit."[4]

[edit] Dada and Merz

Cover of An Anna Blume, 1919
Cover of An Anna Blume, 1919

Schwitters asked to join Berlin Dada either in late 1918 or early 1919; According to Raoul Hausmann, Richard Huelsenbeck rejected the application because of Schwitter's links to Der Sturm and to Expressionism in general, which was seen by the Dadaists as hopelessly romantic and obsessed with Aesthetics.[5] Ridiculed by Huelsenbeck as ‘the Caspar David Friedrich of the Dadaist Revolution’, he would reply with an absurdist short story ‘Franz Mullers Drahtfrühling, Ersters Kapitel: Ursachen und Beginn der grossen glorreichen Revolution in Revon’ published in Der Sturm (xiii/11, 1922), which featured an innocent bystander who started a revolution 'merely by being there'.[6]

Though not a direct participant in Berlin Dada's activities, he employed Dadaist ideas in his work, used the word itself on the cover of Anna Blume, and would later give talks throughout Europe on the subject with Theo Van Doesburg. Whilst his work was far less political than the key figures in Berlin Dada, such as George Grosz and John Heartfield, he would remain close friends with various members, including Hannah Hoch and Raoul Hausmann for the rest of his career.

Merz has been called 'Psychological Collage'. Most of the works attempt to make coherent aesthetic sense of the world around Schwitters, using fragments of found objects. These fragments often make witty allusions to current events. (Merzpicture 29a, Picture with Turning Wheel, 1920[7] for instance, combines a series of wheels that only turn clockwise, alluding to the general drift Rightwards across Germany after the Spartacist Uprising in January that year, whilst Mai 191(9),[8] alludes to the strikes organized by the Bavarian Workers' and Soldiers' Council.). Autobiographical elements also abound; test prints of graphic designs; bus tickets; ephemera given by friends. Later collages would feature proto-pop mass media images. (En Morn, 1947, for instance, has a print of a blonde young girl included, prefiguring the early work of Eduardo Paolozzi,[9] whilst many works seem to have directly influenced Robert Rauschenberg, who said after seeing an exhibition of Schwitter's work at the Sidney Janis Gallery, 1959, that "I felt like he made it all just for me.")[10]

He was to use the term Merz for the rest of his career. Whilst these works were usually collages incorporating found objects, such as bus tickets, old wire and fragments of newsprint, Merz also included artist's periodicals, sculptures, sound poems and what would later be called "installations".

[edit] Internationalism 1923-37

[edit] Merz (Periodical)

As the political climate in Germany became more liberal and stable, Schwitters' work became less influenced by Cubism and Expressionism. He started to organise lecture tours with other members of the international avant-garde, and published a periodical, also called Merz, 1923-32, in which each issue was devoted to a central theme. Merz 8/9, July 1924, for instance, was edited and typeset by El Lissitsky, whilst Merz 14/15, 1925, was a typographical children's story entitled The Scarecrow by Schwitters, Kätte Steinitz and Theo Van Doesburg.

His work in this period became increasingly Modernist in spirit, with far less overtly political context and a cleaner style, in keeping with contemporary work by Hans Arp and Piet Mondrian.

Thanks to Schwitters' lifelong patron and friend Katherine Dreier, his work was exhibited regularly in the US from 1920 onwards. In the late 1920s he became a well-known typographer; his best-known work was the catalogue for the Dammerstocksiedlung in Karlsruhe. From 1924 he ran an advertising agency called Merzwerbe, and in the late 1920s was the official typographer of Hannover town council. In a manner similar to the typographic experimentation by Herbert Bayer at the Bauhaus, and Jan Tschichold's Die neue Typographie, Schwitters experimented with the creation of a new more phonetic alphabet in 1927. Some of his types were cast and used in his work. A digital revival of Schwitters' 1927 typeface called Architype Schwitters was released in 1997. In the late 1920s Schwitters joined the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation).

[edit] The Merzbau

The Merzbau, Hannover, 1933
The Merzbau, Hannover, 1933

Alongside his collages, Schwitters also dramatically altered the interiors of a number of spaces throughout his life. The most famous was The Merzbau, the transformation of a large proportion of his house in Hannover, at Waldhausenstrasse 5.

Early photos show the Merzbau with a grotto-like surface and various columns and sculptures, referring to similar pieces by Dadaists, including the Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama by Johannes Baader, shown at the first International Dada Fair, Berlin, 1920. Gradually, however, it was transformed into it's most famous incarnation. Photographs from 1933 show a series of angled surfaces aggressively protruding into rooms painted white, with a series of Tableaux spread across the surfaces. Schwitters referred to the Merzbau as a Cathedral Of Erotic Misery.

Photos of the Merzbau were reproduced in the journal of the Paris-based group abstraction-création in 1933-4, and were exhibited in MoMA in New York in late 1936.

The Sprengel Museum in Hanover has a reconstruction of this incarnation of the Merzbau,[11]. (These rooms were not in his apartment, but on the ground floor, in the attic and possibly in the basement.) The original Merzbau was destroyed in an air raid during World War II.

[edit] The Ursonate

 Audio sample:

Schwitters composed and performed an early example of sound poetry, Ursonate (1922-32; a translation of the title is Original Sonata or Primeval Sonata). The poem was influenced by Raoul Hausmann's poem 'fmsbw' which Schwitter's heard recited by Hausmann in Prague, 1921.[12] Schwitters performed the piece regularly, developing and extending it, until finally publishing his notations for the recital in the last Merz periodical, 1932.

[edit] Exile

In January 1937 Schwitters fled to Norway, and in the same year, his Merz pictures were included in the Nazi exhibition titled "entartete Kunst" in Munich. Schwitters started a second Merzbau while in exile in Lysaker nearby Oslo, Norway in 1937 but abandoned it in 1940 when the Nazis invaded; this Merzbau was subsequently destroyed in a fire in 1951. His hut on the Norwegian island of Hjertoya, near Molde, is also frequently regarded as a Merzbau. This building has been more or less left to rot since 1940.

After a short period of internment on the Lofoten Islands, Schwitters fled to England, and was initially interned in Douglas Camp, Isle of Man. He spent time in London, then in 1945 moved to the Lake District, where, in August 1947, he began work on the last Merzbau, which he called the Merzbarn. One wall of this last structure is now in the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle; the shell of the barn remains in Elterwater, near Ambleside. The site has now been purchased from its former owners and will house a digital replica of the wall in Newcastle, and, eventually, a Kurt Schwitters study centre.

[edit] The Last Years

For Käte, 1947
For Käte, 1947

Cut off from the centres of the European Avant-Garde, and with International Modernism beleaguered by rising tides of nationalism across Europe, Schwitter's work in exile became increasingly organic, with natural forms and muted colours replacing the mass produced ephemera of previous years. Pictures such as 'Small Merzpicture With Many Parts' 1945-6 [13] used objects found on a beach, including pebbles and smooth shards of porcelain.

After the war, his friend Käte Steinitz started to send letters back to Schwitters from the USA, 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.[14] She encouraged Schwitters to 'Merz' this ephemera, the result of which was a sequence of proto-pop art pictures such as For Käte, 1947.

Schwitters died in Kendal, England, January 8th, 1948, of a heart attack, and was buried in Ambleside. His grave was unmarked until 1966 when a stone was erected with the inscription Kurt Schwitters – Creator of Merz. The stone remains as a memorial even though his body was later disinterred and reburied in Hannover, Germany, the grave being marked with a marble copy of his 1929 sculpture Die Herbstzeitlose.

[edit] Marlborough Gallery controversy

Schwitters' son, Ernst, largely entrusted the artistic estate of his father to Gilbert Lloyd, director of the Marlborough Gallery. However, Ernst fell victim to a crippling stroke in 1995, moving control of the estate as a whole to Kurt's grandson, Bengt Schwitters. Controversy erupted when Bengt, who has said he has "no interest in art and his grandfather's works," terminated the standing agreement between the family and the Marlborough Gallery. The Marlborough Gallery filed suit against the Schwitters estate in 1996, after confirming Ernst Schwitters' desire to have Mr. Lloyd continue to administer the estate in his will.

Professor Henrick Hanstein, an auctioneer and art expert, provided key testimony in the case, stating that Schwitters was virtually forgotten after his death in exile in England in 1948, and that the Marlborough Gallery had been vital in ensuring the artist's place in art history. The verdict, which was eventually upheld by Norway's highest court, awarded the gallery USD 2.6 million in damages.[15]

[edit] Archival and forgeries

Schwitters' visual work has now been completely catalogued in the Catalogue Raisonné. Forgeries of collages by Schwitters turn up almost weekly on eBay. Before purchasing any work supposedly by Schwitters, it is best to consult the Kurt Schwitters Archive at the Sprengel Museum in Hannover, Germany.

[edit] Legacy

  • Brian Eno sampled Schwitters recording of Ursonate for the "Kurt's Rejoinder" track on his 1977 album, Before and after Science.
  • Japanese musician Merzbow took his name from Schwitters.
  • Canadian poet Colin Morton wrote a book of poetry inspired by Schwitters and a play based on it.
  • A fictionalised account of Schwitters's time in London is the subject of an opera by Michael Nyman, Man and Boy: Dada.
  • Big City Orchestra has performed several of Schwitters plays including "Dramatic Scene" and "Pastoral Play"
  • Canadian composer Christopher Butterfield has performed Ursonate multiple times. He recorded the work at the National Research Council of Canada in 1979.
  • The German hip-hop band Freundeskreis quoted from his poem "An Anna Blume" in their hit single "ANNA".
  • The British indie rock band British Sea Power play parts of Ursonate between songs while playing live.
  • The krautrock band Faust have a song entitled "Dr. Schwitters snippet".
  • Tonio K's second album "Amerika" ends with the "Merzsuite" which includes the lines "This one is for Mr. Schwitters / This one is for Kurt".
  • Billy Childish made a short film on Schwitters life, titled "The Man with Wheels," (1980, directed by Eugean Doyan).

[edit] References

  1. ^ The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, Dietrich, Cambridge University Press 1993, p6-7
  2. ^ Kur Schwitters, Center George Pompidou, 1994, p47
  3. ^ The Merzbild can be seen in the centre of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, 1937, directly below the phrase 'Nehmen Sie Dada Ernst', and was presumably destroyed by the Nazis shortly afterwards.
  4. ^ Quoted in The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, Dietrich, Cambridge University Press 1993, p86
  5. ^ [1] note 23
  6. ^ Richard Humphreys, quoted in [2]
  7. ^ In the Beginning Was Merz, Mayer-Buser, Orchard, Hatje Cantz, p55
  8. ^ The Collages Of Kurt Schwitters, Dietrich, Cambridge, 1993, p111
  9. ^ In The Beginning Was Merz, Meyer-Buser, Orchard, Hatje Cantz, p186
  10. ^ Quoted in Rauschenberg/Art and Life, Mary Lynn Kotz, Harry N Abrams, p91
  11. ^ Kurt Schwitters Merzbau in Hannover 1933
  12. ^ UbuWeb; Sound [3]
  13. ^ In The Beginning Was Merz, Meyer-Buser, Orchard, Hatje Kantz, p163
  14. ^ In The Beginning Was Merz, Meyer-Buser, Orchard, Hatje Kantz, p292
  15. ^ Alexander, Leslie. "Marlborough Vindicated". Art & Antiques April 2001: 38.

[edit] Further reading

  • Burns Gamard, Elizabeth. Kurt Schwitters' Merzbau: The Cathedral of Erotic Misery, Princeton Architectural Press 2000, ISBN 1-5689-8136-8
  • Crossley, Barbara. The Triumph of Kurt Schwitters, Armitt Trust Ambleside, 2005.
  • Elderfield, John. Kurt Schwitters, Thames and Hudson, London 1985.
  • Elsner, John and Roger Cardinal (ed.), The Cultures of Collecting, Reaktion Books, London 1994.
  • Feaver, William. "Alien at Ambleside," The Sunday Times Magazine, 18 Aug 1974, 27-34, [also http://fp.armitt.plus.com/alien_at_ambleside.htm].
  • Germundson, Curt. "Montage and Totality: Kurt Schwitters’s relationship to tradition and avant-garde," in Dafydd Jones (ed.), Dada Culture: Critical Texts on the Avant-Garde, Rodopi, Amsterdam/New York 2006, 156-186.
  • Notz, Adrian and Obrist, Hans Ulrich (ed.), 'Processing the Complicated Order. The Merzbau Today'. With contributions by Peter Bissegger, Stefano Boeri, Dietmar Elger, Yona Friedman, Thomas Hirschhorn, Karin Orchard, Gwendolen Webster.
  • Ramade, Bénédicte. (2005) Dada: L'exposition/The Exhibition, Union-Distribution. ISBN 2844262783.
  • Reichardt, Jasia (ed.) Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters, PIN, Anabas-Verlag, Giessen 1986.
  • Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris (ed.) Kurt Schwitters, poems, performance, pieces, proses, play poetics, Temple University Press, Philadelphia 1993.
  • Schwitters, Kurt (ed.) Merz 1923-32. Hanover, 1923-1932 [numbered 1-24; nos. 10, 22-23 never published: see also the University of Iowa Dada archive.
  • Uhlman, Fred. The Making of an Englishman, Gollancz (1960).
  • Webster, Gwendolen. Kurt Merz Schwitters, a Biographical Study, University of Wales Press 1997, ISBN 0-7083-1438-4
  • Webster, Gwendolen. Kurt Schwitters and Katherine Dreier in German Life and Letters 1999, vol. 52, no. 4, 443-56.
  • Exhibition catalogue, In the Beginning was Merz – From Kurt Schwitters to the Present Day, Sprengel Museum Hannover, Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2000.
  • Exhibition catalogue, Kurt Schwitters in Exile: The late work, 1937-1948, Marlborough Fine Art, 1981.

[edit] External links

[edit] Sound art