Kurt Schwitters

Biography

The house at Waldhausenstrasse 5 in Hanover was destroyed in a British bombing raid in 1943. Schwitters learned of it in exile. For about twenty years he had been turning rooms in that house into what came to be called the Merzbau: a grotto-like construction of columns, protrusions and objects set into them.

He was born on 20 June 1887 in Hanover, the only child of the owners of a ladies’ clothing shop. The shop was sold in 1898, the family bought several rental properties with the proceeds, and the rents supported Schwitters for the whole of his life in Germany. In 1901 he had his first epileptic seizure; because of his illness he was long kept out of military service. From 1909 to 1914 he studied at the Dresden Academy of Art under Carl Bantzer and returned to Hanover as a Post-Impressionist. His first exhibition took place in Hanover in 1911. In 1915 he married Helma Fischer; their son Ernst was born in November 1918.

In the spring of 1917 Schwitters was called up, but in June he was discharged on medical grounds. For the last year and a half of the war he worked as a draftsman in a factory outside Hanover, and he later wrote that there he came to love the wheel and understood that machines are abstractions of the human spirit.

In 1918 he met Herwarth Walden, the Berlin dealer and publisher who ran the Der Sturm gallery, and by June two of his semi-abstract works were hanging there. Among his new acquaintances were Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and Jean Arp. His first abstract collages appeared alongside Arp’s. He took the word Merz from a cut-out advertisement for the “Kommerz und Privatbank” and pasted it into a picture finished in the winter of 1918–19. After his first solo exhibition at Der Sturm in June 1919 and the publication of “An Anna Blume”, a nonsensical love poem, people began to talk about him. The Berlin Dadaists, above all Richard Huelsenbeck, received him coolly. Hausmann recalled that Schwitters asked to join their circle and was refused, but other evidence casts doubt on this: he was under contract to Walden, and the idea of Merz arose before these conversations. I would not treat Merz as a reply to a snub.

He did give Dada evenings all the same: in 1922–23 he toured the Netherlands with Theo van Doesburg and performed with Arp, Hausmann and Tristan Tzara. He became friends with El Lissitzky, and under his influence the collages grew stricter and cleaner. The magazine Merz appeared from 1923 to 1932; issue 8/9 was typeset and designed by Lissitzky, and the last, in 1932, is given over entirely to a transcription of the “Ursonate”, set by Jan Tschichold. The “Ursonate”, a sound poem in the form of a sonata, occupied him from 1922 to 1932, and he first performed it in February 1925 in Potsdam. A recording of his own performance was made on a record in 1932.

He also made a living from graphic design. After Der Sturm closed in 1924 he opened an advertising agency, Merzwerbe, whose clients included Pelikan and Bahlsen; from 1929 to 1934 he was typographer to the Hanover city council, and he designed the catalogue for the Dammerstock housing estate in Karlsruhe. In the late 1920s he joined the Deutscher Werkbund, the German association of designers and manufacturers. Thanks to his American patron Katherine Dreier, his work was shown regularly in the United States from 1920.

Under the Nazis his position worsened quickly. In 1934 he lost his contract with the city, in 1935 his works in museums were confiscated and publicly ridiculed, and in August 1936 the Gestapo arrested his close friends the Spengemanns. On 2 January 1937 Schwitters, who was wanted for an “interview” with the Gestapo, left for Norway to join his son. His wife stayed in Hanover to manage the properties. That same year his works were included in the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in Munich, the Nazi show of condemned modern art, and return became impossible. At Lysaker near Oslo he began a second Merzbau but abandoned it in 1940; it burned down in 1951.

After the German invasion of Norway, father and son fled, and in June 1940 they reached Scotland on a Norwegian patrol vessel. As a citizen of an enemy country Schwitters was moved from camp to camp, and from 17 July 1940 he was held at Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man, known as “the artists’ camp”. There he was given a studio, took on pupils, made more than two hundred works, many of them portraits, and gave Dada readings. Paint was scarce, and the internees mixed brick dust with sardine oil; Schwitters modelled sculptures from porridge, which went mouldy. He applied for release in October 1940 and was freed on 21 November 1941 with the help of Alexander Dorner.

In London he met Edith Thomas, his future companion, and mixed with Naum Gabo, László Moholy-Nagy and Ben Nicholson. His first solo exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery in London in December 1944 brought one sale out of forty works. In April 1944 he had his first stroke. His wife died in Hanover on 29 October 1944; he learned of it in December. In October 1943 word had reached him that the Hanover Merzbau was gone.

From 26 June 1945 he lived in Ambleside, in the Lake District. Money came from portraits and landscapes for local people and tourists; in 1947 there were collages with pictures from the mass press. The Museum of Modern Art in New York awarded him a fellowship of £1,000 to restore his earlier constructions, and he spent it instead on the Merzbarn, a barn at Cylinders Farm in Elterwater. He worked there daily as far as his health allowed.

On 7 January 1948 Schwitters received word that he had been granted British citizenship. The next day he died in Kendal Hospital. He was buried on 10 January in Ambleside. In 1970 his remains were moved to the Stadtfriedhof Engesohde in Hanover. A section of the wall of the Merzbarn is kept at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle, and a reconstruction of the first room of the Hanover Merzbau is in the Sprengel Museum.