Page 62 - Studio International - October 1972

Kurt Schwitters It is still shocking, this business of turning bus After repeated illnesses in childhood he was
tickets and rusty pram wheels into art. But what
none too fit and soon proved his uselessness to
shocks us now is not what shocked the burghers the war effort.
at the of Hanover and Berlin. They trembled at the But that war changed him and the world.
Hanover itself becomes a remarkable
Marlborough sacrilege of using the offal of the urban avant-garde centre — in terms mainly of
organism as matter for and of art. We doubt,
rather, the propriety of interfering with such exhibitions, lectures, performances, but also for
real things in order to manufacture art — a while in terms of creative people. Schwitters
especially an art that is so evidently beautiful. visits Berlin repeatedly to get into the Sturm
To get Schwitters right one has to bear in world of Expressionism and Futurism and the
Norbert Lynton mind a number of background and foreground Dada world of Hausmann and Co. His circle of
factors. His native Hanover: Hanover was/is no friends and collaborators widens interestingly:
joke. A smaller Reading ? Northampton ? His Arp, van Doesburg, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy.
THE SCHWITTERS EXHIBITION IS AT family firmly bourgeois (no burgeoisdom firmer This indicates changing concerns. Schwitters
MARLBOROUGH FINE ART FROM 7 — 28 OCTOBER than the German); his art training firmly had invented his patent world medicine, Merz,
academic. Schwitters himself no rebel : he wants in 1919 and for a few years he merzed busily in
to be a good academic painter. Married aged 28 pictures, prints, drawings, poems, prose,
after six years engagement, lives with wife in the dramas. In effect it was a fusion of Futurism and
parental home. Three months as soldier in 1917. Dada, executed in rubbish: urban rubbish

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