THE LAST WORK OF KURT SCHWITTERS
I
A “HANKERING AFTER THE PRIMITIVE” is how Richard Huelsenbeck has described Schwitters’ work, a wish to get away from “the complicated, overcharged, perspectively seen present.”1 In the last years of his life, spent in the obscurity of the English Lake District, Kurt Schwitters found such an escape from the urban environment which had dominated his German work. His work had always been a kind of running autobiography; that part of it done outside Germany sees a significant attachment to nature which effects the creation of new and different species of objects. Chief of these is the Elterwater Merzbarn. We are here concerned principally with this last period of Schwitters’ life, from 1945 until his death early in 1948. During these years appears the culmination of his interests in natural phenomena and the extension of certain problems of picture-making beyond the Cubist bases of his earlier art. These two aspects of his art, I suggest, are complementary: the strikingly different characteristics of Schwitters’ post-German work is indicative of an essentially rural pattern of living. Schwitters’ “rural” preoccupation is the theme of this study. His concern for landscape was long-standing (Hannah Hoech has recalled sketching expeditions she made with Schwitters around 1925), but “natural” themes themselves did not significantly affect Schwitters’ work until he began visiting Norway in 1931. The influence of dramatic scenery never left him, and it was therefore very fitting that the last years of his life should have been spent in a likewise ideal landscape in the north of England.
Schwitters’ had first visited the Lake District in 1944, on a month’s holiday from London where he had been staying since his release from internment as an alien in 1941. When the war ended, he was without ties: his wife had recently died in Hanover, and his son had returned to Norway. London, moreover, had not been an easy place in which to live for Schwitters. A German, but not a Jew, and what is more, a man of no strong political persuasion, he had found life hard, even desperate. When the chance came, he wished to move to a more sympathetic environment; and so, in the June of 1945, accompanied by his friend Wantee, he settled in Ambleside, to the north of Lake Windermere in Westmorland.2 Here he lived, he said, a very romantic life. In search of portrait commissions, he met local townspeople, doctors, the local school teacher, and some farmers, who became his circle of friends and admirers in his last years. He held court for them in his lodgings, demonstrated his little ritual of making paste from flour and water, like a Chinaman brewing tea, and made to their delight a Merzsoup from cabbage leaves and chocolate. It was, for Schwitters, though very poor, an ideal existence in an environment to which he formed a close attachment. The obscurity of his existence never seemed to dishearten him, the artistic isolation seemed irrelevant. Merz had always been a one-man movement. His rural work is selfishly personal and private.
But despite the gaiety that Schwitters emanated, these final years were full of illness. In October of 1946, he wrote to Hausmann and to Spengemann telling them of his misfortunes: of being bedridden seven of the last 18 months, of five separate illnesses, of being blind for a fortnight, of a second heart attack. On the 8th of October, he fell and broke his right thigh and was in bed again, until Christmas. But the work continued, and he planned new and more daring ventures. He began preparations for an exhibition of collages to be held in New York. In June of 1946 he had started work on a new magazine, collaborating by post with Raoul Hausmann on what was originally to have been called Pin-hole Mail.3 This continued to occupy him for nearly a year; but during his illness in the winter of 1946–47, a new idea was beginning to occupy his mind, a notion which came to so obsess him that all else was forgotten: a new Merzbau. Schwitters’ concern with its planning was possibly one of the reasons why he gave up working on Pin. Its building certainly hastened his death.
II
The first, Hanover, Merzbau, of which such intriguing accounts and photographs exist, had been destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943. A second, in Norway, was abandoned in an early state with the German invasion (and perished without trace in a fire in 1951). It seems that when assured by letter from Spengemann in Hanover that, the first Merzbau was beyond repair, Schwitters began to think of a third. But to speak of Schwitters’ three Merzbauten is in a sense not quite the truth. The Merzbau concept was the inevitable by-product of his manner of working: the accumulation of unused debris which he had collected found its way into fantastic configurations wherever he worked. So, there are stories told of a weird structure of broken furniture, linoleum, even porridge, in the window of a house on the Isle of Man in 1940. Doubtless there must have been others. But of these, two only were elevated by the title of Merzbau, and one as Merzbarn.
In the summer of 1947, a Mr. Harry Pierce, Lakeland farmer and amateur landscape gardener, noticed in the house of his friend, Dr. Johnston, a portrait by Schwitters which he much admired. He therefore invited the artist to visit him at “Cylinders” farm to paint his wife. There, Pierce showed Schwitters around his estate, a section of which he had converted from rough land into a delightful garden. It was here that Schwitters noticed an unused straw-barn which Pierce had built during the war from old Lakeland stone. Pressed by Wantee, Schwitters asked if he could use the barn for his work. Pierce agreed, and work soon began on the Elterwater Merzbarn.
Cylinders farm was about five miles from Ambleside where Schwitters lived, some 350 feet up the Langdale Valley and set against the towering forms of the Langdale Pikes, overlooking Lake Elterwater; but there was a suitable if infrequent bus service to this lonely spot, and Schwitters, often accompanied by Wantee, made his daily trips and set to work. The scenery which surrounded him there was spectacular and dramatic; it was inevitable that the Merzbarn should draw so much from this environment. Schwitters’ work was constantly indebted to the character of its material components, to his immediate world. His admiration for Mr. Pierce was in cognizance of such facts: he recognized in this improver of landscape a temperament not so different from his own, except channeled into gardening:
He is a genius . . . he lets the weeds grow, yet by means of slight touches he transforms them into a composition as I create art out of rubbish. He wants to give me every assistance. The new Merz construction will later stand close to nature, in the midst of a national park, and afford a wonderful view in all directions.4
The summer of 1947 was warm at first, and work went well on the barn. But the weather soon changed to damp, cold, and windy days, and Schwitters realized that things were to be difficult. There was no door or window in the barn, but gaping holes which let in the elements. The roof leaked, and a stream ran across the bare earth floor. There, he mixed up cheap plaster and applied it to the walls with spatula, knives, or with his bare hands. A little paraffin stove was not much help in keeping him warm, and candles had to be used to give more light. From the start it was a desperate measure, and Schwitters’ health got no better. A persistent asthmatic complaint was worsening. His friends were worried and urged him to take care, but he knew from the start it was a race against time. “I build a lifework,” he wrote to Kate Steinitz. “I have so little time left,” he told his friends.
Mr. Pierce and another friend, a Mr. Jack Cook, helped Schwitters on the heavier work. A new roof was put on the barn, and, at Schwitters’ instruction, a small window knocked out over the top right corner of the wall on which most work was being done, and under which a column was to have been built. Perhaps guessing that it would never all be finished, Schwitters chose to concentrate effort on one wall. But the whole was planned. All the walls were whitewashed, and plumb lines on short posts were laid out to divide up the floor area, and to form a kind of directed walk for the would-be spectator/participant. Another small window was made against the door jamb, and it was hoped to incorporate this in the final effect. A stone wall was built jutting diagonally into the room, which obscured from view the principal relief, but had in it a niche holding a sculpture through which could be glimpsed the space beyond. Another curving dividing wall was at one time a possibility, but got no further than being provisionally laid out with string. Whether this was to have been built is not known. Schwitters does not seem to have made up his mind on this; he chose rather to try to complete one small section, perhaps so that he could thus envisage the whole effect.
All that now remains of this project is the single wall relief. But from the outline of Schwitters’ plans we know that he never conceived of the work as simply mural decoration. This was architecture; without function it is true, but architecture, though of a primitive kind. Like the Hanover Merzbau, the concept combines an enclosed impression of material density with a unifying spatial aspiration (cave and cathedral); but here it is presented in the form of a rural grotto. And just as the first Merzbau was incomplete (on principle), we cannot here truly imagine what would have been the “final” effect. Perhaps the most suitable comparison with Schwitters’ consciousness of nature revealed in the Merzbarn is with earlier, mid-18th century visitors to the Lake District, namely the Picturesque travelers, whose city eyes searched for ruins and grottos, and, like Schwitters, admired abstract parallactic effects as the visual field is transformed, presenting not one but many pictures to the eye. It would of course be unreasonable, if not dangerous, to overstate such comparisons, and yet they seem relevant. The cultivated sophistication of the 18th century appears far from Schwitters’ spontaneous enthusiasms; the Picturesque did, however, bring to landscape a similarly abstract vision, an essentially visual concentration on phenomena. Just as “it is the aim of picturesque description to bring the images of nature as forcibly and as closely to the eye as it can,”5 so Schwitters’ use of the collage technique selects objects and pushes them forward into the perceiver’s space. The Merzbarn was certainly an emotional architecture, and one close to nature. Huelsenbeck, as we have noted, called Schwitters a “primitive”; but he is a soft primitive, working in an ideal landscape.
III
While at Ambleside, Schwitters incessantly explored the countryside and brought parts of it back to take their place in the collages and constructions he made: pieces of bone, twigs, pebbles and shells, as well as the familiar papers and wrappings—but now even these were, of course, mainly English. One reads of the “Ribble Bus Company,” of “Player’s Cigarettes” and “Marmite,” where before it had been “Hansi-Schokolade” or “Anna Blume.” When in Germany, Schwitters had stated, “If I ever move from Hanover where I love and hate everything, I will lose the feeling that makes my ‘world point of view.’”6
Something basic did in fact change. Schwitters’ German “world view” was that of the city, of a mechanical civilization under which man squirmed like the victim of Kafka’s torturing machine. This urban man was evicted through circumstance into a nature which had seemed so alien to abstractionism in general; and yet, for Schwitters, it was an experience which could be assimilated. Nature itself was viewed esthetically as a kind of grand objet trouvé, something to be wondered at, and yet to be compassed by his city eyes. Hauser has characterized Dadaism as a kind of romantic Rousseauism in its advocation of chaos;7 in this context it is Rousseauism in the sense that Schwitters viewed nature ideally as a primitive wonderland, so different from his love/hate relationship with city life.
But in a curious way, Schwitters’ late work produced in exile recalls his very first Merz pictures. The collages and constructions eschew the formal sophistication of the twenties, when he committed himself to Elementarism, and return to that direct manner, naive even, characterized by a vigorous awareness of placement, and of the identity of original materials. In the years immediately following the Great War, Schwitters had established a system in which the material itself became the essential formative element and carrier of meaning. The material, he realized, was the really active part of the forming, and could not be simply “used” (compositionally), but must itself suggest its correct configuration. In this “culture of materials,” the objects used are no longer gross matter, but activity or energy itself. The “forming” was in the development of laws to assist the intersection of materials and not laws to simply control them. And thus Schwitters could move from conventional notions of unity and harmony towards a more open-ended, aformal, and essentially psychological approach to making, which permitted the materials to establish their own rightness of character.
In its assertively spatial form, the Merzbarn is of course closer to Schwitters’ constructions than to his collages. The intended interior divisions would have worked against the possibility of a rationally coherent space, in the sense that Schwitters was purposively confusing perception of the space which was his starting point. And this is very different from the effect produced in general by the collages, evidence again that the material suggested its own forming logic. In Difficult of 1942–43, the bodily flatness spread by the pasting of the papers is a stated fact, and although a limited space does exist from the overlappings, there is no obvious ground nor any manifest illusionism. The materials essentially speak for themselves pictorially—they are visually discrete; and any associative reaction is provoked by our awareness of the sources from which the materials come rather than by the configurations they take. Moreover, the basic compositional and chromatic ties within the collage tend to assimilate the disparate source elements. In the constructions, as with the Merzbarn, the very assertive three-dimensional nature of the objects and forms used makes such an assimilation more difficult. And yet Schwitters seems to have striven for a firm internal connection, and, as in the collages, used color to establish relationships. But in many of the constructions, the color is not of the objects, but self-consciously applied as a generalized painterly treatment to create a unifying style or bild to the work, acting as a kind of dominating set to establish a particular mood. Since the novelty of Schwitters’ late work develops essentially through his constructions rather than his collages (works usually—but not always—of a larger scale than most of his output), it is pertinent to consider aspects of the development of his work in this area.
In formal terms, Schwitters’ work does not really evidence much development. The discoveries of the early years formed the basis for that which followed. There are certainly no truly drastic innovations in style, no sudden redirections which took him outside the prescribed framework of assembled art. He was never detached enough for this to be possible. But there is, nevertheless, a discernible change of attitude to composition in the post-German work. At one level, the early and late constructions are alike. Das Haarnabelbild of 1920 and 9 of 1943 both show a similarly random (yet ordered) arrangement of three-dimensional forms set against a complicated and “stylish” background. But it is within these shared criteria that the changes can be noted. What receives revaluation in Schwitters’ late work is the relationship of forward and backward planes; an essential concern in that he thus assessed the value to him of conventions of picture making which he had inherited from his Cubist, Futurist and Expressionist sources, conventions which demanded a describable pictorial space related to the physical dimensions of the work of art and to the integrity of the picture plane itself. Such criteria, I suggest, never entirely solved for Schwitters certain problems involved in making constructions of high and low relief elements together. In the development of his constructions, Schwitters reveals, from around 1931, a new attitude to surface, to painting, which in turn implies a revaluation of the spaces thus formed. From a comparison of the two works noted, and from a consideration of other late constructions, we may appreciate the distinction of Schwitters’ “natural construction.”
In the Haarnabelbild, Schwitters’ pictorial structure is of distinctly conventional nature, even though formed from unconventional materials. Thus, there is a base organization of interlocking, angular, transparent planes formed predominantly of two-dimensional collage elements, on top of which lies a limited number of assertive relief forms. Paradoxically, however, the flat lower zone tends to read in a spatial manner: the paper planes continually intersect in transparency which denies their flatness, while the added painting on and around these planes adds to the illusionistic effect. But the main reason why this recessed zone falls away is not to be found in itself, but rather in its relation to the more concrete character of the objects placed on top of it, which have an unequivocal relation to the surface of the picture (often casting shadows which thus define an actual plane), and act as the extension of the repoussoir device, like the imitation printing in Cubist pictures.8 These concrete objects cannot easily be read in the same way as the flatter objects forming their expressive ground structure (because of their relief and their limited formal integration) and hence assert themselves as outer referents. Here, then, the likelihood of an object working as formal motif or referential trigger is largely determined by its neighborhood and context. A tension exists between objects of predominantly either inner or outer reference.
This problem of combining what we may call the structural and symbolical functions of the material element was really Schwitters’ life work. As the Haarnabelbild reveals, the problem is at its most extreme in those constructions which combine high and low relief. In the early twenties it was not entirely solved.
It is essentially in the treatment of the literal ground plane that the significant changes occur. In the Haarnabelbild, the fragments of paper are forced into archaic (Cubo-Expressionist) compositional devices; the structure is of lines, of the edges of planes, but not of the planes (materials) themselves. During the twenties, two possibilities seem to have suggested themselves as ways out of this dilemma: first, in those works where there is a complicated structure of interlacing planes, these so fill and overlap the pictorial surface that one can no longer talk of “ground” any more. This is the direction taken by the collages, and its ramifications extended throughout the whole of Schwitters’ oeuvre, right up to some of the English collages, such as Difficult. The second, alternative, course, where Schwitters wished to use strongly three-dimensional elements, was to arrange these upon a fairly plain, stated ground. These constructions moved quickly into the Elementarist area, assumed fairly rigorous forms (for Schwitters), and more directly reflect the influence of twenties abstractionism than do the collages. But in either case, Schwitters was using the potentiality of the concrete object mass, and not just its edges. However, the problem of combining high and low relief forms in a single work without sacrificing a structural and symbolical coincidence was at this time not resolved, but postponed. Only when his Elementarist preoccupations had passed did he take up the problem again.
IV
From 1931, Schwitters began to spend his summers in the highlands of Western Norway, and there his interest in landscape was considerably strengthened. It is from around this date, too, that the backgrounds to his constructions began to assume that dappled manner which characterizes 9 and similar works. It is this painterly innovation, the replacement of a conventionally Cubist-ordered base plane for a personally impressionistic one, that does in fact go far to destroy the sense of a delineated space itself. This is something for which Schwitters has been criticized. Some have noted a decline after 1931. Certainly, the late works demand a different critical standpoint from that which we bring to urban Merz. It is not, however, a decline but a reassessment. In an important sense, moreover, the late constructions are the most daring of Schwitters’ works. For the first time he freed himself from the tradition of the integral plane which had hitherto dominated his production, a device which he finally recognized as the convention it was. But such freedom was not won without cost. To be daring is to take risks, and the late works seem at times unbearably casual, uncomfortable in Schwitters’ refusal to be bound by any system, though that system would have guaranteed, as it did, a more coherent end product.
This is the pattern for the constructions of the last years. Only a few of the collages are so “chaotic,” understandably, since the flat paper works cannot “naturally” achieve great depth. In fact, some of the later examples do move in this direction. Rotterdam of 1937 utilizes a similarly textured base plane as exists in the contemporary constructions, though, compared to them, still essentially serene and self-controlled. Some collages, like Grey, Blue, of 1946–47, break into depth by using photographic elements. Others use overlays so deep that they cannot be truly thought of as collages.
In the constructions, however, surfaces are rendered immaterial. Unlike the early work with its defined planes, constructions such as 9 come close to confounding our apprehension of what is really there and the illusionary. The heavy painterly markings on both “background” and attached objects camouflage surfaces and create an impressionistic space continuum within which the objects are dissolved. At times we perceive certain debris forms (the cogwheel, “9” itself) as islands in space; but more frequently they are immersed in their painterly equivalents. It is an out-of-focus world, to be glimpsed only tentatively, yet vigorous and direct at the same time. Merzbild “Alf” is pocked and scratched like a real landscape, the formal imprecision clearly visible. The dramatic Glass Flower pushes its stamen some ten inches in front of the forms behind it. In some constructions, however, the added objects are more directly presented, after the manner of the high relief works of the twenties; but here the comparison ends. These late works are rarely “com-posed,” but appear simple selections of found matter, the images of nature brought forcibly to the eye. One, Try Field’s . . . , a modest oval tin, contains a seemingly random heap of objects which appear to have fallen there of their own accord, and which the artist has simply taken up, but in doing so impressed his personal stamp. We are continually reminded that for Schwitters, art was an extension of living, an expression of the patterns of personal behavior. As Herbert Read, one who admired Schwitters’ work and gave him encouragement, had written in another context, “Selection is also creation. Nothing is so expressive of a man as the fetishes he gathers around him . . . Art in its widest sense is an extension of the personality: a host of artificial limbs.”9
Schwitters’ work had always been self-relevant. His materials, even when used as discrete formal elements, act as signals or tokens which work their selective capacities upon our memory. In the Lake District, the objects used tell of a rural pattern of living. Now, not only the waste of a civilization was rescued, but more often strange stones, and birds’ feathers which had not before been touched by man’s hand. The roughnesses tell now of natural evolution, of the effects of the elements, not of man, except of the man who stooped to pick them up. No more a didactic art, about Revolution in Revon, but a private meditation. His work is permeated by a shredded and dappled manner which reveals “the genius of the place.” At times he seems to be making real landscapes: Ullswater confounds categorization. At one level it is a landscape painting; but also almost a quotation from the world, a piece taken up, like lifting turf, and placed in time. Wantee-side (whose title reveals its personal meaning) could likewise be almost a “realistic” fragment, say, floating debris. Such works are pocket-sized picturesques populated with objects of natural significance, interweavings of romantic and impressionistic visualizations of water, air and earth. In one sense they are visual illusions; but are more importantly cosmic symbols of a natural order realized through representative tokens of that order (like the Wortreihe of his poems). The sculptures of these years echo natural processes; smooth plaster forms, often colored, canes blocked into cement, branches he had collected. Such works stood inside the Merzbarn; and it was from such preoccupations that the Merzbarn relief itself emerged.
V
The main wall on which Schwitters worked was about fifteen feet long and eight feet high, at the far end of the square barn room, opposite the door, and therefore better lighted than the rest. He covered most of this wall with plaster, strengthened by wire, twigs, garden-canes and the like, in a kind of wattle-and-daub technique. Some sections of the plaster were built out to form ribs and flat plateaus which seemed to grow towards the little window in the roof. Such forms appear almost to have followed natural and organic patterns. We are reminded of some words Schwitters had written fifteen years earlier, “Merz twists its limbs until it forms something, until an end appears by a logical development.”10 Or the way in which he had defined nature, “Nature, from the Latin Nasci, means to become, to come from; that is to say, all that through its own force develops, forms and moves.”11 The patterns of the Merzbarn seem sublimated in a kind of organic ineloquence to an overall idea of light.
But, for Schwitters, nature was not only the forms but the objects (the part representative of the whole), and soon found debris was added: a tin can painted bright red, a piece of metal framing which enclosed a miniature “collage,” a china egg, used to coax hens into laying, was hidden in a crevice. A rubber ball, and parts of a child’s watering can similarly found their way into their places on the wall, as well as organic objects: small pebbles, roots, even flowers. But the objects are in general disguised, and peep modestly from their hiding places. Some parts of the plaster were given texture, like the dappling and stippling in the contemporary paintings, and the roughness of the stone walling added to this effect. Other sections of plaster were smoothed laboriously, and colored: a small area was tinted orange, another green and yellow, and below, a patch of Indian red.
The envisaged effect of the whole seems to have been a kind of “roughness and sudden variation joined to irregularity.” The objects were losing their identities in a painterly whole. If we are honest, we know that the strength of association prevents us from entirely viewing objects abstractly, and yet Schwitters continually asserted the relative unimportance of the external references of the objects he used:
It is irrelevant whether materials had any established value before they were used for producing a piece of art. They receive their evaluation through the creative process . . . By being balanced against each other, these materials lose their characteristics—their personality poison. They are dematerialized and are only stuff for the painting which is a self-related entity. A significant art product has no longer an outward relationship to the material elements that formed it.12
And again, “The medium is as unimportant as I myself. Essential is only the forming.”13
This insistence on the role of materials and of the artist himself as merely a catalyst towards forming is in many ways surprising, and is really not the impression that one deduces from the work itself. Perhaps Schwitters was only too aware of the innate strength of both material and personal sources to his art, and thus wished to compensate for this. An art such as his occupies a precarious position between the abstract and the nostalgic. Only the conscious will to form creates the possibility of what Rauschenberg has called an art of fact.
This “forming” was for Schwitters a continually additive process, and even the “finished” area of the wall cannot be assumed to have been completed. Indeed, his attitude to the process itself paralleled nature, as defined by Collingwood, writing near the time the Merzbarn was made. “Nature will be understood as consisting of processes, and the existence of any special kind of thing in nature will be understood as meaning that processes of a special kind are going on there.”14 Schwitters’ method of working always placed great emphasis on the happening, the controlled accident, the willingness to keep forms in a state of flux. Something he wrote of the Hanover Merzbau illustrates how this might happen:
You might say it grows according to the principle of the city: somewhere another house is to be built, and the municipal housing commission has to see that the new house does not make a mess of the whole urban picture. In the same way I come across some object . . . I take it along, paste it on, glue something on it, in the rhythm of the total effect, and one day we find that some new trend has to be shaped which passes wholly or partially over the dead body of the object . . . Through the growth of ribs there originate valleys, hollows, grottos that maintain their individual existences within the whole.15
But the urban analogy is a little out of place here. The Merzbarn is a rural monument, reflecting the caprices of nature rather than of housing commissions. It is natural and primitive, a cave softly worn whose walls grow like plants to the light, beginning to assume that serpentine form, characteristic also of the landscape of the Lake District itself.
VI
Schwitters’ naturalistic work is the really problematic part of his oeuvre. Most of his critics have chosen to ignore it; most admirers have approached these works with something akin to embarrassment, and his continual preoccupation with naturalistic painting indeed caused distrust among those who were sceptical about the collages, anyhow. Fred Uhlman recalls that many of those with him on the Isle of Man (where Schwitters was interned) were forced to conclude that Schwitters made collages simply because he was so incompetent as a representational painter. Uhlman himself said the landscapes “remind me of poached eggs on spinach!’” In many ways, such criticism is well-founded: the portraits, still lifes and landscapes are subsidiary works. Moreover, Schwitters’ own attitude to them is strangely ambivalent. On the one hand, he is reported to have considered such work as mere potboiling, not only, perhaps defensively, in letters to his artist friends, but also to those (in Ambleside) who valued it more than his collages and constructions. And yet there is Schwitters’ constant obsession with things seen, his continuous record of naturalistic painting which reveals a deep attachment to traditional painterly values. At one level, one might assume that such work was for relaxation, like a Sunday painter after a week at the (Merz) office, and this is surely part of the truth. But Schwitters affirmed it an essentially relevant part of his whole activity. He conceived his abstract pictures as products of an earlier attachment to illusionary realism (“an unbroken line of development leads from the naturalistic studies to the Merz abstractions”18), and yet, in principle, “imitation remains imitation. Imitation is weakness and error.”19 But, strictly speaking, his naturalistic work is not directly based upon imitative principles: he does not so much create likenesses of objects or people, but rather expressive moods.
Most of the naturalistic works are hurried impressions. Many, especially the portraits, reveal their financially incumbent necessities, and such paintings do not, in general, bear close analysis. And yet we must take account of them for the attitudes they imply. In Germany, Schwitters had made landscapes, though he was quite prosperous. From Ambleside, he wrote to Hausmann:
In my soul live as many hearts as I have lived years. Because I can never give up or entirely forget a period of time during which I worked with great energy—I am still an Impressionist, even while I am Merz . . . I am not ashamed of being able to do good portraits and I do them still. . .
But it is not so much the quality of his naturalistic pictures which is now of interest, as the fact that he wished to make them at all. His was an all-inclusive existence.
Schwitters’ naturalistic technique is itself relevant to, his more important body of work during these last, “natural,” years. In his letters, he makes much of the fact that the English did not like brushmarks: “My pictures have brushmarks and therefore I have difficulties.”21 Mr. Bickerstaff, whose portrait Schwitters painted in 1946, recalled his surprise at Schwitters’ method of working: always very close to the canvas, never standing back to judge an overall effect, but absorbed in the manipulating of thick impastos, although he could thus never see how the work as a whole was progressing. This involvement with the material parallels his method of working on collages, as described by Charlotte Weidler:
He spread flour and water over the paper, then moved and shuffled and manipulated his scraps of paper around in the paste while the paper was wet. With his fingertips he worked little pieces of crumpled paper into the wet surface . . . In this way he used flour both as paste and as paint.22
Both processes reveal the same interest in surfaces, in closely related variances of material. Schwitters had often expressed his admiration for Dutch landscape painting, and his work might indeed be considered as an extension of that tradition, which has its origin in the surface textural counterpoint of Venetian painting. In this sense, he is not at all “mystical” as many have claimed (closer to Reynolds than to Blake). His late work thus lies within a painterly tradition as well as a fetishistic one.
The same kinds of worked surface one finds in Schwitters’ landscapes exist also in the painted abstract pictures. Red Circle of 1942 uses only very few added objects, depending mainly upon the nuances of the brush. Even the “proto-Pop” Zebra is “naturalized” by Schwitters’ painterly dapplings.
What he found in the study of nature cannot be separated from what he made into abstract art. Collage cannot conceal its relation to nature. Like Klee, Schwitters wished to orient himself in the natural world, and was able to reproduce not only the static factors of what he saw, in the landscapes, portraits and still lifes, but also, in the collages and constructions, the forces and genetic processes of nature itself. But whereas in Klee the reference to life is in the repertory of quintessential figurative images, in Schwitters it is produced by the contextual reference of the materials. Moreover, not only were pieces of nature itself used, but also quotations from his naturalistic apprehension. He had conceived of this as early as 1920. “The reproduction of natural elements is not essential to a work of art. But representations of nature, inartistic in themselves, can be elements in a picture, if they are played off against other elements in the picture.23
Yet the excellence of Schwitters’ work is often in direct proportion to the quantity of its added materials. Where he relied to a major extent on “original invention” (here, the Impressionistic painting, whether in a figurative or abstract context), the results were frequently disappointing. But Schwitters’ “naturalism” is nevertheless integral to his production as a whole, and one cannot but conclude that the experience of landscape was, in these last years, particularly significant. “No man can create from his fantasy alone . . . Only by the constant study of nature will he be able to replenish it and keep it fresh.”24
He therefore affirmed the necessity of a laborious study of nature, so that some Dada variant of a central form might be apprehended. For Schwitters, this would manifest itself in “the new naturalistic work of art” which “grows as nature itself” and “is more internally related to nature than imitation possibly could be.”25
But the order that Schwitters saw in nature was in no way a rational thing. It was part of his predilection for “nonsense” and as such can be equated with the new logic of randomness, the employment of a flexible rather than fixed meanings system, which is one of Dada’s most important attributes. But from the study of landscape, the artist could recognize certain fundamental rhythms and movements. A Dada mentality released Schwitters’ mind from preconceptions, and allowed him to look at nature with a fresh eye, for “Dada is without meaning, as Nature is.”26 Schwitters had earlier pointed specifically to this random makeup of natural configurations: “Nature or chance often carries together things which correspond to that which we call Rhythm. The only task of the artist is to recognize and limit, to limit and recognize.”27 In another place he wrote that in his abstract work “there is the influence of all I have perceived in nature.”28 In all, it is this sense of natural processes, of the living organism, that emanates from Schwitters’ late work, and from the Merzbarn as we know it.
VII
Before embarking on his “construction close to nature,” Schwitters had made small models and designs for architecture and furniture from stones and branches he had picked up. He is recorded as expressing great interest in the structural problems that the building of the Merzbarn involved. We remember that he did undergo architectural training at the Technical College in Hanover in 1918. Although little enough was finished, it is nevertheless a remarkable piece of work for a considerably sick man to have done in some six months. He called it “the highest sculpture of my life.”
Since the latter part of 1946, Schwitters had been in correspondence with the Museum of Modern Art in New York hoping originally to obtain money in order to repair the Hanover Merzbau. During the winter of 1946–47, however, he learned that this would be impossible for the building had been destroyed completely; moreover, his poor health prevented travel. It was during this period that he seems to have conceived the idea of the new Merzbau. Hitherto he had depended on sales of his portraits and landscapes to bring in the £5 per week on which he and Wantee entirely lived. In April of 1947, however, the Museum of Modern Art agreed that a grant would be provided for Schwitters to make the new Merzbau, and this allowed the financial independence for him to begin work. On June 16th, official confirmation came of an award of $1,000. They held a tea party at Cylinders to celebrate. But the very next day, Schwitters’ health took a drastic turn for the worse. Lung-bleeding for five hours sent him back to bed once more, where he spent his 60th birthday. He recovered, and set to work again, but almost from the start the Merzbarn was thus constructed against insuperable odds. By August he was spending most of his time in bed, and yet persisted in dragging himself up to Cylinders for a few hours each day. He had, he said, not “Herzasthma” but “Merzasthma.” One of those curious, naive, poems that he used to write shows us his thoughts at this time:
One day
You finish to be a boy.
But you play
Still with your old toy.
You like all the old angels
As you did before,
And think they are girls,
Beautiful girls.
You think they are like you
When you were young
But you are old
And die and get cold.29
A final heart attack on the 5th of January, 1948 ended it all, and Schwitters died three days later in the hospital at nearby Kendal. In April of 1946 he had applied for British nationality. This was granted him the day before his death. The day he was buried in Ambleside, an exhibition he had been planning opened at the Pinacotheca in New York.
For Schwitters, the Merzbau idea had always represented the summit of his attempts towards the coordinate work of art. In the Merzbarn, we see the unity of the arts to nature. The objects of his construction were rudimentary and commonplace, but he physically created a real space of certain emotional appeal. One would imagine that Uvedale Price’s Mr. Seymour would have been very much impressed by the work of this Dada Dr. Syntax: “You have given this very extraordinary piece of art as an instance that the most beautiful pictures may be produced by the most ugly and disgusting objects.”30
John Elderfield teaches at the Winchester School of Art, Hampshire, England.
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NOTES
1. “Dada and Existentialism,” in Willy Verkauf, Dada: Monograph of a Movement, London, 1957, 58.
2. The principal source for Schwitters’ stay in Ambleside has been my conversations with those who knew him there, chiefly Edith Thomas ((Wantee), some of which are recorded in my unpublished dissertation, Kurt Schwitters, the Inclusive Work of Art, University of Leeds, April 1966. Reference was also made to Werner Schmalenbach, Kurt Schwitters, Köln, 1967. Other sources are indicated by further notes.
3. Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters, Pin, London, 1962. Introduction by lasia Reichardt.
4. Quoted by Carola Giedion-Welcker, “Schwitters: or the Allusions of the Imagination,” Magazine of Art, 41, October 1948, 221. (In 1965, the end wall of the Merzbarn, containing the relief, was moved from this site because of its continued deterioration, and was later installed in the Hatton Gallery of the University of Newcastle.)
5. Gilpin, Northern Tour, 1786. Quoted by Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque, London, 1927, 34.
6. To Huelsenbeck. Quoted by Harriet Janis and Rudi Blesh, Collages: Personalities, Concepts, Techniques, Philadelphia, 1952, 73.
7. Arnold Hauser, The Social History of Art, London, 1962, IV, 222.
8. Cf. Clement Greenberg, “Collage,” Art and Culture, Boston, 1967, 73.
9. Surrealism, London, 1936, 64.
10. “Les Merztableaux,” Abstraction-Création-Art Non-figuratif, 1, 1932, 33.
11. Merz, 8–9, April/July 1924, 74.
12. Merz, 1, January 1923.
13. “Merz” (19201 in Robert Motherwell, ed., The Dada Painters and Poets, New York, 1951, 59.
14. The Idea of Nature (1945), London, 1965, 17.
15. “C o E M,” Transition, 24, June 1936, 91; Jolas’ translation of an article from Merz, 21, 1931, 115–116.
17. The Making of an Englishman, London, 1960, 239.
18. “Merz” (1920), Motherwell, 57.
19. “Art and the Times,” Ray, 1, 1927. Reprinted in Form, 5, September 1967, 31.
20. Pin, 15.
21. Letter to Hausmann. Pin, 5.
22. Quoted by Janis and Blesh, Collages, 76.
23. “Merz” (1920), Motherwell, 59.
24. Quoted by Ernst Schwitters in the catalog, Schwitters, Marlborough Fine Art, London, 1963, 3.
25. “Art and the Times,” Form, 5, 31.
26. Hans Arp. Quoted by Hans Richter, Dada, Art and Anti-Art, London, 1965, 37.
27. “Art and the Times,” Form, 5, 31.
28. Abstraction-Création-Art Non-figuratif, 2, 1933.
29. This untitled poem is published here for the first time by the courtesy of Edith Thomas. Other of Schwitters’ poems of this period are in Pin, and others are appended to Stefan Themerson, Kurt Schwitters in England, London, 1958.
30. Sir Uvedale Price, “A Dialogue on the Distinct Character of the Picturesque and the Beautiful,” On the Picturesque_, London, 1842, 520. ’The reference was in fact to a painting by Teniers.
