Talk:Kurt Schwitters
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[edit] Dada rejection
According to "The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology", edited by Robert Motherwell, Schwitters was rejected by the Berlin Dadaists. However, he was involved in the small Hanover scene of Dadaism. --128.205.191.62 00:59, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
This page is unuseful. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.69.61.101 (talk) 22:17, 2 December 2007 (UTC)
The correspondence between Schwitters and Huelsenbeck, to found in the Kurt Schwitters Archive of the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, shows that Huelsenbeck supported Schwitters from mid-1919. Huelsenbeck describes them both as battling against the 'Spiesser', the blinkered bourgeoisie. The two seem to have fallen out over a Dada publication in Hannover at the end of the year, but even then Huelsenbeck expresses admiration for Schwitters' work. (Schwitters also writes to Tristan Tzara of his contacts with Huelsenbeck (correspondence in the Bibliotheque Jacques Doucet, Paris)).
In addition, Schwitters was under contract to Herwarth Walden's Sturm Gallery, and was not permitted to exhibit his works under the Dada label. (For one example, see the caption under his contributions to the final Zurich Dada publication, Der Zeltweg and the comment on Schwitters in Katherine Dreier's Western Art and the New Era, published in 1923.) There was no Dada group, even a small one, in Hannover. Hausmann and Schwitters gave a Dada performance in Hannover in 1923 and a Dada soiree was held at Galerie von Garvens in 1922 (those who attended are listed in the Garvens guestbook) but to talk of Dada Hannover is really misleading. Gwendolen webster (talk) 07:40, 3 June 2008 (UTC) Gwendolen webster (talk) 07:16, 29 February 2008 (UTC)
I wrote sections of the article before reading the discussion... i find the above fascinating. Can I add it to the notes??? It's the most contentious issue in Schwitter's career, and depends partly on how anarchis/careerist you view berlin dada. It seems to me that Schwitters had far more in common with Hugo Ball's original Zurich version, more childlike, influenced by Klänge era kandinsky... If Schwitters had asked to join Zurich dada they may well have accepted. Ideas??Trevelyanhouse (talk) 22:18, 20 May 2008 (UTC)
Schwitters actually contacted Zurich Dada in mid-1919 onwards and published his work in the Zeltweg in late 1919 - the last Zurich Dada publication, as it turned out. His correspondence with Tzara is in the Bibliotheque Jacques Doucet in Paris, reproduced in Raoul Schrott, dada 15/25 (Haymon Verlag, Innsbruck 1992). At the same time Schwitters met Huelsebeck, who expressed admiration for his work - it wasn't until 1920 that they fell out, but by that time Huelsenbeck had more or less distanced himself from Berlin Dada. Schwitters knew Kandinsky, of course, and was a great admirer of his work. (For an interesting gloss on this, see a sketch by Schwitters 'Mondrian, Schwitters, Kandinski, Moholy' of 1926, in the Kurt Schwitters Catalogue Raisonne, No. 1487.
Between 1919 and 1923, Schwitters also wrote for international Dada publications and took part in Dada soirées at home and abroad. Nonetheless, his association with Dada was calculatingly borderline, partly because he was under contract to Walden’s Sturm gallery. In 1926 he wrote that since 1919 he had been reckoned a Dadaist ‘without being one’, and you might say that Dada that adopted Schwitters rather than the reverse. Leading figures of the movement such as Tzara and Lajos Kassak promoted his work, he was greeted as an authority on Dada on the 1923 Dada-Holland tour, and Katherine Dreier included him in her New York Dada exhibitions despite his insistence that he was not a Dada artist: ‘Only one painter besides Duchamp has expressed Dadaism through the art of painting, Kurt Schwitters [...] and strangely enough, he rejects the appellation.’ (Katherine Dreier, Western Art and the New Era, Brentano, NY,1923, p. 120).
In general, it was the confrontational nature of his public activities, such as those surrounding his poem An Anna Blume, that led to his being classed as a Dadaist by the press and the general public – an impression that Schwitters did little to discourage. On occasions when he associated himself directly with Dada, it was in connection with his literary works and generally a matter of expediency; one of the rare exceptions is the passage from the Merz 21 (Das erste Veilchenheft), 1930, in which he explicitly describes himself as a former Dadaist. There is a sense in which Schwitters has become Dada by default; like Marcel Duchamp, he is never missing from exhibitions and general publications on Dada, so that he is classified as a Dada artist merely by virtue of his inclusion in books, catalogues and anthologies on the subject. Attention is seldom paid to Schwitters’ ambivalent attitude to Dada and to the way he frequently turned the label to his own advantage. As he himself realized, it paid off to consign experimental works to a diffuse but high-profile phenomenon that rejected any common style. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Gwendolen webster (talk • contribs) 07:36, 3 June 2008 (UTC)
[edit] Merz Periodicals and Die Kathedrale
Does anyone know enough to write a seperate page about the periodicals, and place them within the context of 291 and others?? My german isn't up to it. There is a good external link [1]. I think that the article could do with a lot more about the years 1923-37, and discuss the use of the periodical to establish and exploit links with other modernists throughout Europe. What did El Lissitsky think of him, for instance??
I have never seen a copy of Die Kathedrale, which seems in descriptions to come a lot closer to the archetypal Artist's book than An Anna Blume Dichtungen does. Again, it would be nice to include a page about it and link in with Category: Artist's books and multiples, a series of articles I'm trying to compile about seminal artist's books.Trevelyanhouse (talk) 07:22, 7 June 2008 (UTC)
