Page 63 - Studio International - October 1972

recycled as art, an inclusive process, cool on the works were toured by the Nazis as 'Degenerate managed, for instance, to start writing poems in
surface and often witty but (it seems to me) Art'. In Norway he merzed for himself and English after only the shortest time to learn the
motivated by romantic and Expressionist hopes painted landscapes and portraits for money. As language. They are not his best but at least they
not so far from those shown more openly in his the Germans arrive in 194o he escapes to Britain. give us direct access to him as a writer, which
earliest known paintings. Internment, then quiet years in London and translations of works like the brilliant,
Constructive, as well as Constructivist, near Ambleside. A little bit of encouragement untranslatably funny Anna Blume cannot. 0
tendencies replaced this quite quickly from 1922 from men like Mesens and Herbert Read, a few
on. We see, blatantly, the influence of Lissitzky, friends. The main work of his last years remains,
van Doesburg and the others. What we must unfinished but substantial — a Merzbau done on
understand (histories of modern art discourage and with the wall of a barn in Little Langdale.
it) is that these tendencies and their forms were Now it stands in Newcastle, rather lonely and a
not, and were not held to be, contradictory to good deal smaller than it looked in situ. One limb
Expressionism and Dada. Van Doesburg the of the thing was making for a skylight when
hardlining abstractionist was also I. K. Bonset Schwitters died.
the Dadaist; Lissitzky worked with Arp as well The Marlborough show ranges fully from the (This page)
as with Schwitters; van Doesburg, Lissitzky and earliest Expressionist works to those of his last Merzbild 1A (Der Irrenarzt) 1919
Assemblage and oil on canvas
Moholy attended the Weimar Dada conference. years. Before these English works one wonders
18 7/8 x 15in, 48x 38*2cm
Thus Schwitters continued to be the public what this country did to him. His wit comes to
Dadaist, twisting the public's nose by the fore again, but also a taste for elegant (Opposite page)
Merzbild mit Kerze 1925/28
unknotting its conventions in endless sweetness that has an English period flavour.
Assemblage and oil on wood
publications and public readings. But he also There was a chameleon element in him. He 10½ x 10½ in, 26*6 x 26*6cm
worked as a Moholy-ish typographer, was in
1927 a foundation member of the elementarist
group that called itself die abstrakten hannover
and busied itself with typography and
architecture as much as with art, and in his own
collages and reliefs used an idiom that was close
to international elementarism even though it
often included 'wrong notes' of a dislocating
sort. Thus he was constructing as well as
knocking down, and if this implies confused
attitudes (sarcasm and possible nihilism on the
one hand; romantic utopianism on the other),
we must remember the mind-boggling
incongruity of post-war Germany : the wave of
internationalism and brotherliness; the mounting
anger against the foreigners' victory and their
punitive reparation demands, hence mounting
nationalism and race consciousness coinciding
with the collapse of the German economy; in the
later twenties solid growth on the economic
front accompanied by rising fascism and the
total loss of that shared disaster and shared
hope for the future that had made the
immediate post-war years so creative.
He visited the Bauhaus in 1925, presumably
at Moholy's invitation, and recited there his
Urlautsonate, his long sonata of basic oral
sounds, originally inspired by Arp. The evening
was a flop. There was thought of publishing two
Schwitters books as Bauhaus bücher; that was
given up. In the stronghold, after 1923, of
dogmatic elementarism he was too much the
wild man, the expressionist primitive.
Unfortunately we have lost the work in which he
got it all together, the hard and the soft, the
public and the private: the Merzbau of wood
and plaster and paint and all sorts of bits and
pieces that he started in one room and which
gradually grew through three storeys of his
house. It was part cabinet of Dr Caligari, part
private fun palace. He called it his Cathedral of
Erotic Misery — which is presumably meant to
tell us something. Those in a position to explain,
don't.
He had had several holidays in Norway. In
1937 he settled there, and later that year his
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