By then Schwitters was living, self-exiled, in England, after having spent more than a year interned in detention camps there.
An application for a United States visa had been turned down. After suffering a stroke he was supporting himself marginally by painting landscapes and portraits. In 1947, on his 60th birthday, he received money from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to recreate Merzbau, but by then he was too ill to do heavy work. He died six months later, one day after being granted the British citizenship for which he had waited years.
The facts of his late years are painful to contemplate, yet much of the art in “Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage”, a gift of a show at the
Princeton University Art Museum, feels just the opposite. Even when hermetic and melancholic, as many of them are, the collages are a delight, transcending the number-crunching, language-mangling modern world they reflect. And when they’re joyous, they have a true in-love-with-life lift, with hints of nature blooming through.
Inside the first gallery, before you can even examine the art, you hear a semi-natural sound, something between a thrush’s call and a cuckoo clock, then a kind of Papageno’s song of mews, blips and nonsense syllables, broken by a military rat-a-tat. It’s all Schwitters, performing his phonetic poem “Ursonate,” or “Sonata in Primeval Sounds.”
For decades he regaled European audiences with the piece, driving some listeners from the room, leaving others in stitches. He made at least two recordings of the piece and was still performing it in London as late as 1947.
Schwitters made no categorical distinctions between his art (painting, collage, sculpture, design, installation), his writing (poetry, essays, children’s stories) and his performances. To him they were all integral parts of a one-man cultural movement called Merz, which he invented, deriving the name from Kommerz, German for commerce.
The multidisciplinary nature of Schwitters’s output, which can make a career survey look like a group show, may be one of the reasons he remains an underknown figure. His sole American retrospective, at
MoMA, was 25 years ago. Representative samplings of his art have since rarely been on view, there or elsewhere.
Yet he has had a huge effect on post-World War II artists and is revered by many. Two of the collages in the Princeton show are from
Jasper Johns’s collection; two others are owned by
Ellsworth Kelly.
Robert Rauschenberg, who introduced Mr. Johns to Schwitters’s work, was a major fan. And a Schwitters effect, however indirect and unrecognized, can be spotted in much contemporary work.
Even in his own time he was hard to get to know. He made contradictory impressions on people who encountered him. To those who knew him through his performances he was an extrovert: a large, hammy guy with big ideas and a big voice, relishing the role of clown.
But he could quickly drop into loner mode, shy away from company, rebuff unsought friendship, assert the middle-class proprieties he grew up with. After bouts of what seemed like compulsive extroversion, he spent long stretches on his own. And the dozens of collages and assemblages at Princeton suggest how he used that time.
Meticulously puzzled together from paper, fabric, wire, scrap wood and other everyday materials, these pieces are the work of a sorter and measurer, a concentrator, a tabletop worker, someone who found satisfaction — more than that, comfort — in up-close, fine-grained aesthetic control. Even the Merzbau, with its interior network of nooks and shelves, projected deep focus, on a walk-in scale.
The exhibition, which originated at the Menil Collection in Houston, has some of all of this material, including a replicated section of the Merzbau. But with only 80 works, it’s clearly a theme show, not a survey, the theme being the persistence of painting throughout Schwitters’s career.
It’s an unadventurous approach, with problems. No doubt the curators — Isabel Schulz, executive director of the Kurt and Ernst Schwitters Foundation at the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, Germany, and Josef Helfenstein, director of the
Menil Collection — wanted to correct a mistaken view of Schwitters as an anarchic, antiart wild man.
But reducing him to “primarily a painter” is also a distortion, and one too in line with current, conservative market fashion. Still, it’s hard to complain about any show that brings together as many wonderful things as this one does.
And Schwitters did begin as a painter, and stayed one. Born in Hanover in 1887, he went to art school there and in Berlin, working in a by-then-mainstream romantic, Expressionist mode.
At the same time he was attracted to a new movement called Dada, which embraced art and literature equally and strove to confuse distinctions between art and life.
In 1918, under its influence, he made his first abstract collage from bits of torn trash, including bus tickets, cigarette packaging, chocolate wrappers and cloth, and then published a collage-style poem called “To Anna Blume.” To his surprise the poem was a popular hit, too popular in the view of certain Dada big shots who declared him ineligible for membership in their antiestablishment movement. He didn’t care. He was far more interested in creating than in rebelling. And besides he already had Merz.
The 1920s became a personal Merzathon.
Collages, sculptures, prints and poems flowed. Schwitters met all kinds of vanguard artists — friendly Dadaists like Tristan Tzara and Hannah Höch; Constructivists like El Lissitzky; Theo van Doesburg, a founder of the movement known as De Stijl — and collaborated with many of them. He traveled Europe nonstop, performed tirelessly, had shows and attracted collectors.
A good part of the Princeton exhibition is made up of works from this period, and they’re on fire, changing from piece to piece.
A very early collage called “Mz 11 Strong Picture” from 1919 is a jumble of words and numerals; a visual poem, tense and tight, like two cellphone conversations in proximity, with one word, “stark” — the German word for “strong” — repeated at different volumes.
In other abstract collages, color and texture become content. This is true of “Mz 371 bacco” from 1922, with its bursting yellow and red tobacco label, its scrap of handwriting like a whispered aside and its all-over surface pattern of crackling and wrinkling. Similar effects become combustive in “Mz. 410. Something or Other,” as cut-paper shards fly outward, fabrics unravel, and a bird feather, stabbing into the composition’s center, seems to be exploding and disintegrating.
These collages have an ambiguous dynamic: they’re festive, but they’re not benign. Thought of in terms of sound, they could be fireworks or gunfire. World War I was just a few years in the past. The atmosphere of cosmic uncertainty it generated was still very much in the air. For Schwitters, who was both an adventurer and an elegist, drawn equally to the new and the old, who kept dashing to the cultural front lines then pulling self-protectively back, art making was a crucial stabilizer.
You sense the steadying role it played for him in “Mz 601,” a 1923 collage radical in its pre-Minimalist play of grids and classical in its precisely judged asymmetries. And you sense it in the strikingly spacious, airy 1932 assemblage called “Körting Picture.” Done during or after one of Schwitters’s repeated getaways to a remote Norwegian island, it replaces urban detritus with a frond of seaweed and a patch of bark, and adds flickering strokes of paint like water-reflected light.
Overt references to nature, to cloud-filled skies and forests, recur in the 1940s, along with diminutive wood and plaster sculptures — surely Cy Twombly knows them well — as personable as pets. But organicism in the late work more often takes abject form. Collages grow denser and junkier, soiled with pigment and dirt, affixed with lumps of matter as dark and moist looking as chewed food or dissolving flesh.
Even the immaculate-white Hanover Merzbau, in a much-traveled full-scale reconstruction from the 1980s by the stage designer Peter Bissegger, feels claustrophobic and tomblike. To Schwitters this precursor of contemporary installation art was Merz in excelsis, a fit container for everything he cared about. But it isn’t an opening-out, heart-gladdening utopian space. It’s the equivalent of a
Joseph Cornell box: a repository for relics, secrets and occult signs, a personal theater, and a retreat.
No wonder Schwitters was shattered by its destruction. (He started two other Merzbaus, in Norway and England, but never got far.) Not only had an artist lost the monument by which he hoped to be remembered; one of modernism’s signal outsiders, who often looked like anything but, had lost a place to hide, and never found the means or the time, precious time, to rebuild it.
Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage
WHEN AND WHERE Through June 26, Princeton University Art Museum, Elm Lane, off Nassau Street, Princeton, N.J.
“Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage” remains at the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, N.J., through June 26; (609)258-3788, artmuseum.princeton.edu. It then travels to the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum.
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