The Urban Poet

By ROBERT HUGHES

Take a dentist's drill, a meat grinder . . . Take lights and deform them as brutally as you can. Make locomotives crash into one another . . . Explode steam boilers to make railroad mist. Take petticoats and the like, shoes and false hair, also ice skates.

So runs one part of a scenario for total theater, as imagined soon after the infinitely worse chaos of the First World War by a German collagist, poet and would-be dramaturge, Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948). The scenario casts a long shadow. Schwitters' ambition to assault all the senses with a megalomaniac collage of real things onstage is the middle term between Wagner and the plotless, junk-crammed happenings that were the talk of the New York art world in the early '60s. The more one sees of Schwitters, the more Robert Rauschenberg's and Jasper Johns' work in the '50s seems to owe to him: the stuffed goat, the paint-soaked bed, the light bulb, the pathetic coat hanger were all predicted in Germany 30 years before.

In Europe, however, Schwitters was virtually the last great modern artist to be widely misunderstood and rejected. Uprooted from his native Germany by Nazism, he found himself cast adrift at 49, a hard age at which to begin life in exile. He went to Norway, and then in the early '40s passed through a series of British internment camps. The artworks and documents he left behind in Hanover were destroyed in an air raid. He suffered from epilepsy and strokes. His wife died of cancer. To support himself he had to do tourist views and kitsch portraits in the Lake District village where, at 60, he died. But he never stopped working, and what a friend called the distinctive "Schwitters aroma"--an amalgam of glue, flour paste and guinea pigs, the portable pets of his exile--followed him to the end of his days.

The retrospective that New York City's Museum of Modern Art has dedicated to his work this summer (through Oct. 1) cannot by nature give much idea of Schwitters' larger ambitions. The projects that vented them either were not begun or were destroyed, like the house in Hanover that he transformed into an immense continuous construction, the Merzbau. The show's catalog, written by its curator, John Elderfield of MOMA, far surpasses in lucidity and thoroughness anything else on Schwitters and becomes the authoritative work on the artist. It evokes in brilliant detail the aggressive and sadistic side of Schwitters' lost oeuvre, which was grandiose and trashy but done with constructivist precision. One of his avant-garde friends, on first viewing the Merzbau's bizarre grottoes and columns (which included such elegancies as a "Sex-Crime Cavern" and a bottle of the artist's urine with artificial flowers in it), thought it "a kind of fecal smearing--a sick and sickening relapse." Would it look so violent today? Perhaps not, but certainly the Schwitters placed before us on the walls of MOMA is a different creature, edited by the survival of small works and the destruction or loss of large ones.

Schwitters was one of the first artists to perceive that a culture writes some chapters of its memoirs in waste. But unlike other German avant-gardists of the '20s and '30s, he was not a political artist with party allegiances; he was utterly absorbed in the ideal of autonomous fine art. "Art is too precious to be misused as a tool," he declared. "I prefer to distance myself from contemporary events . . . But I am more deeply rooted in my time than the politicians." After half a century, Schwitters' constructions, which include every kind of urban detritus--the crumpled sides of a child's tin train, theater tickets, cigarette packs, fragments of type and stenciled numbers, snatches from headlines and posters, feathers, wisps of cotton wool and gauze for atmospheric effect, wheels, burlap, glass, photos, a shooter's target with a neat group punched in the bull's-eye and, after his emigration to England on the eve of World War II, part of a food-ration book--are emblems of their changing times, sharp and pathetic by turns.

Yet they never decay into nostalgia. Schwitters was a lyrical genius, a Persian miniaturist of the modern city street, confecting icons of junk under the eye of strict formal abstraction. One would expect the number of small pieces in this show to be, in the end, fatiguing; but it is not, thanks to Schwitters' dedication to reinventing a surface with each collage. His favorite matrix was the grid of cubism, a shallow, divided skin on which the scraps of paper and little objects surface and vanish, overlapping like leaves on a forest floor. He called them all "Merz" constructions: the name was a fragment of a printed phrase advertising the Kommerz-und Privat-Bank, but it became generic. In these works, cubist ambiguity, constructivist utopianism and a sweet irreverence that was entirely Schwitters' own are knotted together as a gift to the future. The idea of the urban poet as a scavenger was by no means new. It had been around since Baudelaire's ragpicker in the 1860s; in 1882 Van Gogh praised the city dump of the Hague as "a real paradise for the artist." But no one, not even Picasso with his cubist collages, did more to expand and discipline this field of imagery than Schwitters. Consequently, there is something persistently grand as well as tenacious, antic and rebellious about this long-overdue show.