Out of the Midden Heap

By ROBERT HUGHES

In the spring of 1940, Kurt Schwitters was trudging through Norway in flight from the Nazi invasion army. He had only one suitcase of possessions, partly filled with scraps of paper. They were the raw material for collages, and he could not bear to leave them behind. In one pocket he carried a small wooden sculpture at which he whittled on his journey, and in the other a pair of white mice, one of them epileptic. He had quit Germany under Gestapo pressure in 1937, and his works had been banned--along with the products of his fellow Dadaists--as entartete Kunst, "degenerate art."

Eventually, Schwitters escaped to Scotland on a ship with his son and spent 16 months in British internment camps. The camp officials humored him. They let him cut up the kitchen linoleum to paint on, since there was no canvas. Later he settled in the Lake District, produced an uninterrupted stream of work that nobody much wanted, and died in obscurity in 1948, a few months short of his 61st birthday.

It is by now a commonplace that Kurt Schwitters was one of the dozen most influential artists of this century. Everyone who has made assemblages, from Joseph Cornell to Robert Rauschenberg, is in some degree indebted to him. His concept of the "all-enveloping" work of art that could draw on a whole range of media, from paint and sculpture to architecture, sound and print, hovers behind all recent experiments in mixed media. Like Max Ernst, Schwitters is the "classical" Dadaist who destroyed nothing and became instead a kind of stylistic oracle. There have been a number of Schwitters retrospectives to cement the fame Schwitters himself never lived to enjoy. The latest, perhaps the definitive one, is now on view at the Kunsthalle in Duesseldorf, Germany, containing nearly 300 works.

Jubilant Shout. Schwitters did not invent collage as a medium--Braque and Picasso were ahead of him. But when he began making his first assembled images in 1918, he managed to shift the function and look of collage far from its cubist origins. He rummaged through the trash cans of his native Hannover the way an archaeologist might pick over a buried midden heap, on the sound theory that a culture reveals itself in what it throws away. Schwitters was the first to make poetry of this fact, calling his collages "Merz-pictures." The word came from a fragment of paper he had glued on a collage of 1919 that originally read "Kommerz Und Privatbank," but only the four letters Merz remained visible.

It has often been said that Schwitters' use of junk reflected a Dadaist disgust, a sense of hopelessness and pessimism in the wake of Germany's defeat. In fact, his art was a joyful celebration. "The whole swindle that men call war was finished," Schwitters wrote. "... I felt myself freed and had to shout my jubilation out to the world. Out of parsimony I took whatever I found to do this, because we were now a poor country. One can even shout out through refuse, and this is what I did, nailing and gluing it together . . . Everything had broken down in any case, and new things had to be made out of fragments."

Schwitters did not share the political militancy of other German Dadaists. He was less concerned with offing the pig than mocking it and making silk purses out of its ears. "The picture," he wrote, "is a self-sufficient work of art. It is not connected to anything outside." And indeed, the complex interlocks and dark, sonorous reds and greens in his Construction for Noble Ladies, 1919, carry no detectable political message. But he was intensely aware of the extent to which media had begun to affect life, and the fragments of lettering in The Und-Picture, 1919, reflect a world of social imperatives--signs, posters, directives. The word as print fascinated him, independent of its meaning; many of his collages, such as Esir, 1947, were made as a form of concrete poetry.

Brain Coral. The illusion of hardcore Dada, that art could change politics, never took root in him. With profound and wry dignity, Schwitters accepted the contradictions and limits of revolutionary art. Change art and you do not change the world, he admitted. But, he would have added, anyone must work for change with what he has, and all an artist has is art.

Yet Schwitters was also possessed by that Faustian drive that today can be seen in Claes Oldenburg: the ambition to turn the whole world, bit by bit, into an immense objet trouve. Thus his radical invention of environmental art. Schwitters' Merzbau (or Merz-house) in Hannover was the first great work of its kind, integrating assemblage, painting and architecture. Its convolutions reached through two floors and four rooms of Schwitters' home, with a separate offshoot in the attic. It was as if he had deposited the cells and memories of his own brain, wrought out in a coral of bizarre objects, cabinets and boxes, on the walls of a maze.

Schwitters worked on the Merzbau for 18 years, and it was still unfinished when he was forced into exile in 1937. It must have been the most fabulously complex plastic work of the 20th century, a sculptural Finnegans Wake; some intimation of its scope may be had from one detail that Schwitters called The Cathedral of Erotic Misery. This was a column some twelve feet high and six feet wide, with compartments bearing such names as "The 10% War Invalid," "Ruhr District," "Goethe's Grotto" and "Sex-Murders Cavern." They enshrined, among other relics, a tattered stocking, which Schwitters insisted had belonged to Goethe, and a bottle of yellow fluid on which little flowers were suspended, which he whimsically called "the Master's urine"--meaning his own.

Schwitters was making a microcosm of Germany from its own waste products, and there was a bleakly ironical fate in store for the Merzbau: in 1943, an Allied bomb blew it to dust. But its implications, like the legacy of the rest of his work, could not be destroyed. "I know," Schwitters wrote, "that I am an important factor in the development of art and shall forever remain so."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.