SCHWITTERS IN BRITAIN at the TATE BRITAIN

SCHWITTERS IN BRITAIN at the TATE BRITAIN

 Kurt Schwitters (1887- 1948) worked in Germany before World War 2, a member of the European avante garde based in Hannover in Niedersachsen, Germany. He initially became famous as the author of Dadaist poems and satires on traditional German love poems, sending up trite conventions of love and romance. He also worked as an artist, pioneering a form of Dadaism based on his preference for collage known as Merz, especially the Merzbau, two rooms of his own house in Hannover transformed into an installation (1929). Eventually his work was condemned by the Nazis and placed into the entarte – degenerate art exhibition at the Haus der Kunst, Munich. Schwitters had been working in Norway since the early 1930s but now took unofficial exile in that country. Then, three years later, Norway fell to the Nazis necessitating Schwitter’s rapid move, along with his son Ernst, on an ice breaker to Britain in 1940. When he arrived in Britain, instead of receiving the rapturous welcome he expected as an artist fleeing an evil, genocidal tyranny, Schwitters was summarily interned in Hutchinson camp, a kind of concentration camp on the Isle of Man for 16 months. He was eventually released but only after sending humiliating begging letters which were co-signed by his fellow inmates to luminaries such Sir Kenneth Clarke who was then head of the National Gallery, saying that ‘art cannot live behind barbed wire’. 

Schwitters lived in London during the war years, gathering items for his collages and found object art works but eventually moved to the Lake District in 1945. His work is a mixture of abstraction, collages constructed from various trivial modern and disposable items and advertising, often placed in juxtaposition with the works of the Old Masters, found object works and realist landscapes and portraits. In Europe he had been associated with Dadaism and Constructivism and artists such as Raoul Hausmann, Hans Arp and Theo van Doesburg. When he arrived in London after his time at Hutchinson camp (which seems to have been a time of great artistic ferment for Schwitters and the other inmates who created art from pieces of lino that they cut out of the floor, even carving images of animals in the blue tint that covered their windows and also Schwitter’s sculptures in porridge.), he made friends among the British art avante garde, artists and critics such as Ben Nicholson and Herbert Read. Kurt Schwitters exhibited alongside major British and surrealist artists in the 1942 touring exhibition, New Movements in Art. His only solo show in London was held at the Modern Art Gallery in December 1944. Herbert Read wrote the introduction to the catalogue describing Schwitters as the ‘supreme master of collage’. He also performed his original poem Ursonate at the exhibition which has a Spike Milliganesque appeal to modern readers but despite some encouraging reviews he found it difficult to make a living from his art, depending on support from his family and friends. 

Eventually he moved to the Lake District in 1945, hoping that there would be better possibilities for commerce since things had clearly been dire for him in London. He gained valuable commissions but died just three years after arriving in Ambleside, early and unexpectedly, probably failing to make a commercial impact as a consequence of his lack of contacts among Establishment figures. Schwitters demonstrated great confidence with oils but probably found conventional painting, a great source of commerce for artists, to be dull hence his attempts to make collages from old rubbish, juxtaposing the famous images created by the Old Masters with trivial, mass produced artifacts, adverts for snake oil, razors, talcum powder, crazily amassing heaps of cheery bric a brac. Schwitters clearly anticipated abstract expressionism, pop art and postmodernism although the context he created in was always precarious, he at least vindicated his aesthetic beliefs and politics.

 Paul Murphy, Tate Britain, April 2013

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