Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile

Megan R. Luke is assistant professor of art history at the University of Southern California.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2014 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2014.

Printed in the United States of America

23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14       1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08518-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09037-5 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226090375.001.0001

Illustrations in this book were funded in part or in whole by a grant from the Meiss/Mellon Author’s Book Award of the College Art Association.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Luke, Megan R., 1977– author.

Kurt Schwitters : space, image, exile / Megan R. Luke.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-08518-0 (cloth : alkaline paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-09037-5 (e-book)

1. Schwitters, Kurt, 1887–1948.   2. Artists—Germany—Biography.   3. Art, Modern—20th century—History.   I. Title.

N6888.S42L85 2014

709.2—dc23

[B]

2013032854

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

KURT SCHWITTERS

SPACE, IMAGE, EXILE

Megan R. Luke

University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

For Tim

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A Withdrawal from Appearance

A Composition of Fragments

Boundaries into Horizons

1. Radiating Space

Space and Composition in the New Typography

Paintings That Move Themselves

The Transparent Body

The Limits of Merz and Mondrian

Performing a Theory of Spatial Formation

2. The Wandering Merzbau

Off the Pedestal and Out of the Frame

A Photograph of Erotic Misery

Form Exceeds Function

Reflection and Radiation

The Merzbau in Exile

3. For the Hand

The Skin of a Very Small Sculpture

Rebuilding on Bones and Ruins

Resisting Identity

A Sculpture Is a Painted Stone

4. The Image in Exile

Northern Lights

A Recording Device of the Highest Sensitivity

The Merzbau into Painting

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

The plates appear in a color gallery following Chapter 3.

Plate 1. Kurt Schwitters, Hannover Merzbau, west wall, detail of the Blue Window and the KdeE (Cathedral of Erotic Misery), 1933

Plate 2. Kurt Schwitters, Hannover Merzbau, east wall, detail of the Große Gruppe (Great Group) and movable column, 1933

Plate 3. Kurt Schwitters, Hannover Merzbau, south wall, detail of stairway and entrance, 1933

Plate 4. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Abstract Sculpture 1) on the floor of the Merzbau beneath the Blue Window, 1930/36

Plate 5. Kurt Schwitters, relief wall in the Merz Barn, installed at Cylinders, Elterwater, England, 1947

Plate 6. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Colored Half-Moon), 1937/40

Plate 7. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Cathedral), 1941/42

Plate 8. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (The All-Embracing Sculpture), 1942/45

Plate 9. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Recollection of Hjertøya), 1936/39

Plate 10. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Painted Stone), 1945/47

Plate 11. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Stone), 1945/47

Plate 12. Kurt Schwitters, Bild 1926,14 mit grünem Ring / Merzbild mit grünem Ring (Picture 1926,14 with Green Ring / Merz Picture with Green Ring), 1926 and 1937

Plate 13. Kurt Schwitters, Neues Merzbild (New Merz Picture), ca. 1931

Plate 14. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Landscape with Snowfield: Opplusegga), 1936

Plate 15. Kurt Schwitters, Isbræ unter sne (Isbreen under Snow), 1937

Plate 16. Kurt Schwitters, Bild mit Raumgewächsen / Bild mit 2 kleinen Hunden (Picture with Spatial Growths / Picture with 2 Little Dogs), 1920 and 1939

Plate 17. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Merz Picture with Rainbow), 1920 and 1939

Plate 18. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (The Wounded Hunter), 1941/42

Plate 19. Kurt Schwitters, Für Carola Giedion Welker. Ein fertig gemachter Poët (For Carola Giedion-Welcker: A Finished Poet), 1947

Plate 20. Kurt Schwitters, c 57 Smiling through, 1946

Fig. 1. Photographs of Das Ringbild and Das Merzbild by Kurt Schwitters reproduced in Überwundene ‘Kunst,’ Neues Volk 3 (1935)

Fig. 2. Kurt Schwitters, i-Drawing [1], 1920

Fig. 3. Merz 2. Nummer i (April 1923): 18–21

Fig. 4. El Lissitzky and Vilmos Huszár, 4 i Lampe. Heliokonstruktion 125 Volt, 1923

Fig. 5. Cover for Merz 6. Imitatoren watch step! / Arp 1. Prapoganda und Arp (October 1923)

Fig. 6. Centerfold for Merz 6 / Arp 1 (October 1923)

Fig. 7. Paul Schuitema, poster for the exhibition of the ring neue werbegestalter at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 1931

Fig. 8. Kurt Schwitters, detail of the Hannover Merzbau, apparently viewed from the south wall, 1933

Fig. 9. Kurt Schwitters, Die neue Gestaltung in der Typographie (New formation in typography), ca. 1930

Fig. 10. Wassily Kandinsky, Ovale No. 2, 1925

Fig. 11. El Lissitzky, Proun R.V.N. 2, 1923

Fig. 12. Wassily Kandinsky, diagrams depicting the translation of themes from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony into graphic points and line, 1926

Fig. 13. El Lissitzky, Raum der Abstrakten (Abstract Cabinet), left side wall, ca. 1930

Fig. 14. Naum Gabo, Raumkonstruktion C (Space Construction C), 1920

Fig. 15. Naum Gabo, models corresponding to a carved mass (I) and a cube constructed by the stereometrical method (II), 1937

Fig. 16. Naum Gabo, Constructed Head No. 2, ca. 1916

Fig. 17. László Moholy-Nagy, Construction, 1922

Fig. 18. Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 9 b das grosse Ichbild / Merzbild K 7 [?] (Merz Picture 9 b, The Great I Picture / Merz Picture K7 [?]), 1919

Fig. 19. Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 1 B Bild mit rotem Kreuz (Merz Picture 1 B Picture with Red Cross), 1919

Fig. 20. Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow, Blue, and Black, 1921

Fig. 21. Merz 6 / Arp 1 (October 1923): 52–53

Fig. 22. Merz 8/9. Nasci (April–July 1924): 77

Fig. 23. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, perspective view and floor plan, Brick Country House Project, Potsdam-Neubabelsberg, 1924

Fig. 24. Otto Haesler, view of the teaching kitchen in the Volksschule Celle, 1926–28

Fig. 25. Vilmos Huszár, Ruimte-Kleur Compositie voor een Eetkamer (Space-Color Composition for a Dining Room), 1921

Fig. 26. Gerrit Rietveld and Truus Schröder-Schräder, Rietveld-Schröder House, Utrecht, southeast facade, 1924

Fig. 27. J. J. P. Oud, Oud-Mathenesse Site Manager’s Hut, Rotterdam, 1923

Fig. 28. Vilmos Huszár, Ruimte-Kleur Compositie in grijs (Spatial Color Composition in Grey), Til Brugman House, The Hague, 1924

Fig. 29 Vilmos Huszár, Mechanische Dansfiguur (Mechanical Dancing Figure) in various postures, 1920

Fig. 30. Caricature of Schwitters reciting da steht ein Mann from Revolution in Revon with a photograph of Huszár’s puppet, 1923

Fig. 31. Vilmos Huszár, Mechanisch beeldende toneel (Mechanical plastic drama), 1920–21

Fig. 32. Cottage on Hjertøya in front of the annex with Helma Schwitters, 1932

Fig. 33. Kurt Schwitters, cottage on Hjertøya, interior south wall, condition in 1953

Fig. 34. Kurt Schwitters at work on the souvenir brochure for the Zinnoberfest in his Hannover studio, late 1927

Fig. 35. Plan of Waldhausenstrasse 5, Hannover, ground floor

Fig. 36. Kurt Schwitters, Haus Merz (Merz House), 1920

Fig. 37. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Merz Column in the Studio), ca. 1920

Fig. 38. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Merz Column), 1923/25

Fig. 39. Kurt Schwitters, Der erste Tag (The First Day), 1922

Fig. 40. Kurt Schwitters, KdeE (Cathedral of Erotic Misery) and KdeE with terraced staircase of the Liebesgrotte (Grotto of Love), 1928

Fig. 41. Kurt Schwitters, KdeE with guinea pig, ca. 1929

Fig. 42. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (I 9 Hebel 2?), 1920

Fig. 43. Kurt Schwitters, frontispiece of the Hamburger Notizbuch (Hamburg Notebook), 1926

Fig. 44. Hugo Häring, isometric drawing and ground plan of the Gut Garkau, 1924

Fig. 45. Kurt Schwitters, details of the Große Gruppe (Great Group) and the Goldgrotte and Grotte mit Puppenkopf (Gold Grotto and Grotto with Doll’s Head) in the Hannover Merzbau, 1933

Fig. 46. Theo van Doesburg, Tesseracts, 1924–25

Fig. 47. Theo van Doesburg and Cornelius van Eesteren, Maison particulière, contre-construction, 1923

Fig. 48. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Column with Boy’s Head, part of the Merzbau), 1925

Fig. 49. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Grotto with Cow Horn, part of the Merzbau), 1925 (backdated)

Fig. 50. Kurt Schwitters, Madonna [1] (part of the Merzbau), installed before the Blue Window, after 1930

Fig. 51. Kurt Schwitters, detail of the Merzbau with Madonna, after 1930

Fig. 52. Kurt Schwitters, Grotto with Doll’s Head, part of the Merzbau, after 1932

Fig. 53. Kurt Schwitters, sketch of the Merzbau with the library in the KdeE, 1935

Fig. 54. Kurt Schwitters, drawing of the reflection in the mirror in the library in the KdeE, 1935

Fig. 55. Ernst Schwitters, provisorisk altelier-bygg (Makeshift Atelier Building), plan I of the site of the Lysaker Merzbau (Haus am Bakken), 1938

Fig. 56. Ernst Schwitters, provisorisk altelier-bygg (Makeshift Atelier Building), plan II of the elevations of the Lysaker Merzbau (Haus am Bakken), 1938

Fig. 57. Ernst Schwitters, provisorisk altelier-bygg (Makeshift Atelier Building), plan III of cross-sections and floor plan of the Lysaker Merzbau (Haus am Bakken), 1938

Fig. 58. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Birchwood Sculpture), 1940

Fig. 59. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (The Tube Sculpture), 1938/39

Fig. 60. Kurt Schwitters, Das Schwert des deutschen Geistes (The Sword of the German Spirit), 1935

Fig. 61. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (For the Hand), 1937/40

Fig. 62. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Melting Sculpture), 1945/47

Fig. 63. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Little Dog), 1942/45

Fig. 64. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Construction with Sheep Bone), 1945/47

Fig. 65. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (White Miniature), 1945/47

Fig. 66. Kurt Schwitters, Cicero, 1944

Fig. 67. Kurt Schwitters, Beauty, 1941/44

Fig. 68. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Opening Blossom), 1942/45

Fig. 69. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Merz Construction), 1923

Fig. 70. Henry Moore, Maquette for Standing Figure: Knife Edge, 1961

Fig. 71. Hans Arp, Two Thoughts on a Navel, 1932

Fig. 72. Alberto Giacometti, figurines reproduced in Cahiers d’art 20–21 (1945–46)

Fig. 73. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Sculpture with Hook), 1945/47

Fig. 74. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Pebble Sculpture), 1945/47

Fig. 75. Kurt Schwitters, Self-portrait in a mirror at the Hotel Yris, Olden, ca. 1934

Fig. 76. Kurt Schwitters, chart for Impressionism/Expressionism, n.d. (ca. 1937–40)

Fig. 77. Kurt Schwitters, Das Gewitterbild (The Thunderstorm Picture), 1937–39

Fig. 78. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Hjertøya with Fredlyst Sign 2), 1939

Fig. 79. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Snow-Covered Boat Landing), 1937/39

Fig. 80. Kurt Schwitters, Zeichenheft IV Fotokompositionen (Notebook IV Photo-Compositions), 1929/31

Fig. 81. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Photo-Album), ca. 1937

Fig. 82. Kurt Schwitters, Molde-Hjertøy-Aandalsnes-Romsdal-Høvringen (Photo-Album), 1935

Fig. 83. Kurt Schwitters, c 63 old picture, 1946

Fig. 84. Kurt Schwitters, like an old master, 1942

Fig. 85. Kurt Schwitters, Untitled (Oil Wiping on Newspaper 2), 1939

Fig. 86. Kurt Schwitters, 47. 15 pine trees c 26, 1946 and 1947

Fig. 87. Kurt Schwitters, Mz x 21 street, 1947

Fig. 88. Kurt Schwitters, Merz Barn, interior with construction and hat, January 1948

Fig. 89. Kurt Schwitters, Chicken and Egg, Egg and Chicken, 1946

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

At the Sprengel Museum Hannover in 2006, I asked Ursula Reuther, then the conservator of painting and sculpture, to unpack every sculpture by Schwitters in storage. Her response was immediate: Anything for Schwitters! At that moment, this book first seemed possible. Isabel Schulz, director of the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung, likewise made every effort to ensure that its abundant resources were available to me and has been a supportive champion for many years. I am equally indebted to their colleagues at the Sprengel, who hosted my research for an uninterrupted year and for numerous return visits, in particular curator Karin Orchard and paper conservator Ria Heine. Ingrid Mecklenburg offered invaluable assistance with the reproductions, and Helmer Smidt and Maria Haldenwanger helped me to sort through the considerable archival documents in the Schwitters-Archiv.

Of the many scholars who moved me to write this book, first thanks go to Yve-Alain Bois, who challenged me to recognize the importance of Schwitters’s late sculpture and whose scholarship has indelibly shaped my approach to modernism in the visual arts and the writing of its history. Benjamin Buchloh and Robin Kelsey were equally supportive and sensitive readers who offered sustained advice from the outset of my research. Gottfried Boehm, Nancy Troy, and an anonymous reader provided valuable responses at pivotal junctures. Deanna Dalrymple, Uwe Fleckner, Ines Katenhusen, and Eric Rentschler graciously supported my research abroad. Michael White, Lisa Tickner, David Peters Corbett, Emma Chambers, and Cian Quayle gave me especially meaningful opportunities to test my conclusions about Schwitters’s work in England, and Sam Bibby, associate editor at Art History, and Riccardo Venturi, guest editor for Riga, supported publication of excerpts of this study. Gwendolen Webster deserves special mention for being a superlative advocate, providing crucial encouragement, and generously sharing her thesis on the Merzbau as she was completing it.

My research extended to numerous collections in Europe and the United States, and I relied upon the help of Terje Thingvold, Romsdalsmuseet, Molde, Norway; Derek Pullen, Tate Modern, London; John Elderfield, Leah Dickerman, and Adrian Sudhalter, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Wolfgang Erler, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; Jennifer Gross and Cathleen Chaffee, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; and Ian Hunter and Celia Larner, Littoral Arts Trust, Ramsbottom, England. I also appreciate the access I was granted to materials at the following institutions: Kunstmuseum and Tinguely Museum, Basel; Bauhaus-Archiv and Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Museum Ludwig and Michael Werner Gallery, Cologne; Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, The Hague; Hatton Gallery, University of Newcastle, Newcastle-upon-Tyne; Tate Archives, London; Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and Sterling Library, Yale University, New Haven; Houghton Library and Fine Arts Library, Harvard University, Cambridge; National Gallery of Art Library and Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. I am especially grateful to Martin Schuitema and Andres Giedion for their efforts to secure critical images for reproduction and to Geoff Thomas for his permission to reproduce sculptures that Schwitters gave to Edith Wantee Thomas.

This project would have been inconceivable without sustained financial support. Research was funded by the Fulbright Association; Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD); Getty Research Institute; and the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, Harvard University. Writing was made possible through the vital assistance of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Society of Fellows, University of Chicago. Essential funding for the illustrations came from the College Art Association, the Henry Moore Foundation, and the Art History Department and Dean of the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, University of Southern California. At the University of Chicago, I give special thanks to Darby English, Christine Mehring, Joel Snyder, and Martha Ward for their peerless advice. At the University of Southern California, I am indebted to all my colleagues for their encouragement at the finish line, in particular Kate Flint, Suzanne Hudson, and Vanessa Schwartz.

I am grateful for this opportunity to thank Susan Bielstein and Anthony Burton at the University of Chicago Press for their unstinting support for my work on Schwitters. I continually rely on the boundless generosity and enthusiasm of my family, Janet and Richard Luke, Barbara Rubenstein, and Ria and Peter Grundy, and I especially thank my sister Julia Luke for her sensitive design of the cover and her inspiration that gave this book its title. Many friends transformed this project in more ways than they might realize: Timothy Benson, Sara Bodinson, Kenneth Brummel, Miguel de Baca, Allyson Field, Bettina Friedli, Cécile Fromont, Sarah Hamill, Jeremy Melius, Irene Small, Joyce Tsai, Ralph Ubl, Molly Warnock, Alena Williams, and Katja Zelljadt. I dedicate this book to Timothy Grundy, who was with me the very moment I first realized I would write about Schwitters—one afternoon at the Museum Tinguely in front of the collage, on loan from Jasper Johns, for Henry Cowel in Recognition of his Performance (1928). In the nine years that have ensued, he’s been ready to do anything for me so that I could do anything for Schwitters.

INTRODUCTION

On Christmas Eve 1939, Kurt Schwitters interrupted a period of intense and demanding work to write a long letter to his wife, Helma. He was living in exile in Norway, while she had remained behind in Nazi Germany to protect their property from seizure and to care for their aging parents. The painful anniversary marked by his missive would not have escaped their attention—exactly three years prior, they had smuggled their son Ernst out of the country, setting in motion the separation of the family that had, as yet, no end in sight. While father and son were traveling in Norway the summer of 1936, they had learned that Ernst had narrowly escaped arrest when authorities broke up underground cells of the banned Socialist Youth Workers organization, under whose auspices he had been disseminating photographs and information about the brutality of life under the regime for publication abroad. With the police looking for him upon their return in the fall and a new law set to take effect that would have conscripted him for national service for six months, the family resolved that Ernst would leave for Oslo for good the day after Christmas. Two days into the New Year 1937, Schwitters followed him, leaving the city of Hannover, where he had lived for all his fifty years, never to return again.¹

Now as 1940 approached, with Europe at war and the threat of a German invasion of Norway clearly on the horizon, Schwitters wrote his Christmas letter to his wife from the winter residence he shared with their son in the Oslo suburb of Lysaker. In this letter he discussed his art in great detail, updating her on his most recent projects and seizing the opportunity to reflect on changes exhibited by his work over the course of his life. Twenty years earlier, when he had begun to pursue collage to create abstract compositions, he had given this art the distinctive name Merz. He continued to use the term to describe his entire practice, even as it expanded into every conceivable medium and genre:

It’s still Merz, as in 1918, but more refined, lighter and paler, perhaps a little sweet but less dry. I remain the same person but I’ve become older. With all my colleagues I’ve noticed that their work becomes a bit sweet as they get older. That must have something to do with middle age. Afterward it becomes increasingly more simple and austere. In old age a person loses the desire to shine with colors. I see in my current works that there is also room for Merz to develop in old age. When I am dead, they will be able to distinguish clearly 4 periods in my Merz-work: the Sturm und Drang of the first (revolutionary works in the sphere of art, as it were); then the dry, more scientific research into the possibilities and laws of compositions and materials; then the brilliant play with the abilities I gained (my most recent period); and finally, the use of the powers I attained to deepen expression. I will reach that in about 10 years.

Now I have arrived at a brilliant means of articulation in the field of reproducing nature. Isn’t it strange that one can, so to speak, sit next to oneself and objectively evaluate oneself? That sounds odd but it isn’t. You see, it is another who paints—I am not he. I myself am only a recording device of the highest sensitivity. Whoever actually paints, sculpts, writes poetry, and plays music through me, and whoever commands me—that is unclear to me. But when I am at work, I am often astonished that I have apparently resolved to make this or that brushstroke. If I try to clarify the reason while I’m working, I can’t carry out the work any longer. But later I can discern completely objectively why the other Kurt Schwitters made this brushstroke.²

This statement is doubly remarkable. First, we read an artist surveying his own career like an art historian: he divides his practice into discrete chronological periods defined by style and formal change, even going so far as to anticipate with a cool, analytic tone the characteristics of his as-yet-unrealized late work or, more specifically, his Altersstil (old-age style). Second, no sooner do we recognize this to be a confident demonstration of the artist’s capacity for rational, objective self-reflection than we read how such powers of judgment are actually shot through with irrationality. For what else does Schwitters describe here than the workings of his unconscious, of his very self as riven and disordered? His identity is split between creation and conception, flesh and apparatus, production and reproduction. As he works on his materials, he now labors under the detached regard of a newly acquired and almost mechanized subjectivity. What is at stake is nothing less than his claim to any masterful control of the heterogeneous, almost unruly artistic praxis that he has set in motion. Suddenly, the tone with which his analysis of the different stages of his career seemed to logically unfold reverberates with irony. On the threshold of his late period, Schwitters admits his eye has become a kind of camera, a recording device of the highest sensitivity (höchstempfindlicher Aufnahmeapparat). Lacking both a public and a community of peers, he becomes a stranger to himself, externalizing his gaze so that he might be able to continue to make art at all. This gaze captures the other Kurt Schwitters at work, a self who manipulates any medium whatsoever as if blinded by instinct. And the creation of this other is, in turn, constituted—commanded, even—by this reception in recognition, delivered by his very self in the isolation of exile.

Today Schwitters is celebrated for his pioneering work in abstract collage and sound poetry, and for the extraordinary sculptural transformation of several rooms of his home in Hannover, which he called his Merzbau (see plates 1–4). He initially trained as an academic painter, first at the School of Applied Arts in Hannover and then at the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden, where he was a student from 1909 to 1914. Though he would later gain considerable notoriety within the official art press of his day for his abstract canvases and large-scale pictorial assemblages (Merzbilder), his enthusiasm for abstraction and collage did not preclude his ongoing production of oil paintings within the conventional genres of landscape and portraiture. Throughout his career Schwitters made free-standing sculptures as well, and he was a prolific draftsman and writer, not only of poetry but also of plays and prose, fables and children’s stories, and art theory and criticism. During the 1920s he toured Europe giving recitals of his poetry, garnering a reputation as a flamboyant and often scandalous performer. He was tireless in his involvement with scores of artists’ networks and associations, promoting the activities of his peers through voluminous correspondence and in his self-published magazine, Merz, which appeared irregularly between 1923 and 1932. Schwitters was also a successful commercial graphic designer, serving as the founding president of the ring neue werbegestalter, a loose collective of German and Dutch graphic designers committed to the widespread adoption of modernist typography within commercial sectors. In fact, he worked as the chief designer for the Hannover City Council, a post he held from 1929 until the Nazis came to power, and the year he began this contract, he also completed all the graphic materials associated with the construction of the large-scale Dammerstock housing development in Karlsruhe, a project overseen by Walter Gropius.³ Furthermore, while his experiments in printmaking and photography were rare, they are significant: for instance, like his close friends El Lissitzky and László Moholy-Nagy, he published an ambitious lithograph portfolio with the famed Hannover Kestner-Gesellschaft, and he contributed numerous photo-based works to the German Werkbund’s seminal 1929 Film und Foto exhibition, which he made in collaboration with the Dresden-based photographer Genja Jonas.

The four periods of his career that Schwitters described to Helma in his Christmas letter of 1939 correspond roughly to how art historians indeed came to organize this incredibly diverse activity in the wake of his death in the English Lake District in 1948. The first, which he characterized by Sturm und Drang and revolutionary art, coincided with his affiliation with the influential Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin, headed by Herwarth Walden.⁴ In 1917, Schwitters first encountered the poetry of August Stramm, a towering literary figure within the Sturm circle killed in Russia during the First World War.⁵ He quickly changed the tenor and form of his own poetry in response, emulating Stramm’s staccato rhythms, onomatopoeia, and alogical grammar. In the same year, he began to exhibit his first abstract paintings. Walden solicited these oil paintings for Schwitters’s first exhibition at Der Sturm, which opened amid a massive transit workers’ strike in Berlin in June 1918. With Germany’s defeat in the war, the country was embroiled in violently suppressed protests and the Spartacus uprising, a communist revolutionary movement quickly gaining momentum as the year drew to a close. As the revolution reached its climax in 1919, concluding in brutal repression by the military and the formal adoption of the Weimar constitution establishing a German republic, Schwitters emerged as a central figure for a new generation of Sturm partisans fending off vituperative attacks from both the establishment art press and the newly gathered circle of Berlin Dadaists.

In the midst of this social and artistic upheaval, Schwitters penned his most famous poem, An Anna Blume (To Anna Blume), and began making his first collages (Merzzeichnungen, literally Merz drawings), employing a technique of abstract composition using found material often mixed with painterly touches. In numerous autobiographical statements written throughout the 1920s, he often looked back to this period of his career, when he had definitively challenged his academic training and became an active participant within a burgeoning culture of artistic avant-gardes spreading throughout Central Europe. Yet only in 1930 did he explicitly address the role of the great, glorious Revolution in the development of Merz, and then in terms that would find a strong echo in his Christmas letter to Helma almost a decade later during his exile in Norway:

And suddenly the glorious revolution was here. I do not think much of such revolutions; humanity has to be ripe for them. It is like the wind shaking down unripe apples—all that damage. But with it came the end of the whole swindle people call war. . . . I felt free and had to shout my joy into the world. For the sake of thrift I took whatever I found, for we were an impoverished country. You can also shout with trash, and that is what I did, gluing and nailing it together. I called it Merz; it was my prayer for the victorious end to the war, for once more peace emerged victorious again. Everything was wrecked anyway, and new things had to be made from the fragments. That is Merz. I painted, nailed, glued, wrote poems, and experienced the world in Berlin. For Berlin was the cheapest city in the world, and so there were millions of interesting foreigners there. My Anna Blume celebrated triumphs, people despised me, wrote me threatening letters, and avoided me. It was like a reproduction [Abbild] of the revolution within me—not as it was, but as it should have been.⁶

Schwitters employs the same metaphor of reproduction to signal his subjective turmoil as he would in his letter to Helma in exile. Yet here he distinguishes different phases of his career in social rather than formal terms. He does not diagnose a stylistic shift in his manipulation of materials and compositional conventions, but rather he attests that the end of the war, the ensuing peace, and the aborted revolution motivated his desire to shout with trash, to develop an aesthetic that would rehabilitate the fragments left in their wake. If Merz was born of the German revolution, how, precisely, would it age in tandem with the ensuing collapse of the Republic, the diaspora of European artists and intellectuals, and the catastrophe of the Second World War?

Schwitters was unwavering in his commitment to the autonomy of art from party politics. This position distanced him considerably from several of the artists and writers affiliated with Dada in Berlin, particularly those who directed their efforts in support of the newly established German Communist Party. Richard Huelsenbeck, the poet who had been instrumental in bringing Dada from Zurich to Berlin after the First World War, found him irredeemably bourgeois and in thrall to a misguided, obsolete romanticism. Schwitters’s success with An Anna Blume was especially offensive. The ambiguous irony this poem performs with cliché, sexuality, and sentimentality could hardly have seemed more irresponsible or irritating to Dadaists who employed an aggressive, clearly legible satire in the service of eviscerating social critique at a time of considerable state violence.⁷ Schwitters insisted equally on the difference between his art and the agitprop initiatives of Dada. In 1920 he argued, Under Huelsenbeck, Dada became a political affair, whereas such views are alien to Merz. As a matter of principle Merz strives only to create art, because no man can serve two masters. For Schwitters, the impulse to treat art like an instrument for politics actually affirmed rather than revolted against the ideology of the status quo, a sentiment expressed in the 1923 statement Manifest Proletkunst (Manifesto Prole Art) that he signed with Theo van Doesburg, Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, and his publisher, Christof Spengemann: Art is free in the use of its means, but bound to its own laws, and only to its own laws, and as soon as the work is a work of art, it is sublimely raised above the class differences of proletariat and bourgeoisie. . . . With their conservative love for old, outmoded forms of expression and their utterly incomprehensible distaste for the new art, [partisans for proletarian art] are keeping alive the very thing they claim they want to fight: bourgeois culture.⁸

Of course the attitudes expressed in the Manifest Proletkunst—of art following the dictates of its own laws, of the independence of its forms from the prejudices and interests of a given class—were perfectly in keeping with a general tendency to conceive of art as an expression of a universal Kunstwollen (artistic drive or will) specific to a given epoch but untouched by transitory contemporary social specificity.⁹ Nevertheless, the social valence of Schwitters’s art rests in its refusal to accommodate or adapt to normative thinking of any kind, resisting all teleological narratives of development, be they applied to political economy, a will to style, or even gender identification. In fact, the best model for the politics of his aesthetic is that of the antihero of his tale Causes and Beginning of the Great, Glorious Revolution in Revon (ca. 1919/20), which was one of his most popular recital pieces (see fig. 30). This story recounts how the revolution comes to Hannover when the city’s population hysterically overreacts to the fact that a single man is standing there, doing nothing more. The man is too conspicuous—too visible—and for this reason he is deeply disruptive. In Revon (the last two syllables of Hannover in reverse), the outbreak of revolution is a violent reaction against one man’s refusal to act or obey.¹⁰ Anecdotes abound of Schwitters’s capacity to outrage audiences by deliberately flouting conventions that had become naturalized to the point of invisibility within the given social contexts and artistic institutions in which he moved. When faced with an audience of upright citizens, he might bark like a dog; when he confronted the proletarian posturing of some of his peers, he would affect all the stolidity of a provincial bank teller. This principle of inversion, rather than any specific group or party affiliation, governed his relationship to Dada. As he reflected in 1924 for the Polish Constructivist broadsheet Blok:

Dadá (I ask that you direct special attention to the accent) is the best way to make a mockery of entrenched, mindless tradition, of the existing world order (. . . dáda). . . . Dadá is a mirror image of the original Dáda; this is why the accent usually shifts to the second syllable, as is the case with a mirror image (right-left). Dadaism mirrors the old as well as the new, the latest thing as well as the out-of-date, and thereby tests its own strength. . . . Dadá is more an evolution than a revolution. With the following proviso: of course I am a Dadaist insofar as I know this apparatus intimately and I frequently hold it up to the eyes of humanity. And humanity sees itself in the mirror! Then things take a turn for the worst.¹¹

For Schwitters, identity was never absolute but contextually determined: it could always be reconfigured, and, indeed, it became the task of his work to make this law manifest.

In the early years of Merz, Schwitters’s resistance to the idea that identity was fixed or innate extended from his person, as he moved easily among numerous ideologically competing avant-garde alliances, to become a structuring principle for his art. When he alluded to the Sturm und Drang of his revolutionary period, he used this term to signal his debt to early romantic philosophy, which served as a foundation for his aesthetic theories throughout his life. As he came to reject an art predicated upon the imitation of nature in favor of an expressionist painterly abstraction (and, soon thereafter, collage), this critical tradition informed how he would come to grapple with major problems, such as the unstable relation of fragment to totality, subject to world, and phenomena to ideation.¹² With the first Merz works from 1918–20, he legitimized materials that had heretofore been excluded from art-making by incorporating them into carefully composed images (see figs. 18 and 19). The immediate problem these pictures posed was, how should composition be organized so that these materials would cease to be recognized as mere trash or the residue of daily life and instead become available as vehicles for pure color, line, and plane?

In the catalogue that accompanied his major midcareer retrospective, which was organized by Der Sturm and toured several German cities in 1926–27, Schwitters pointed to the typical Merz pictures on display, stating, These were pictures dating from the time of my passionate research into materials, from my revolutionary period. With my study of materials and pictorial laws, there gradually emerged a selection, an integration, the fruit of my labor, and from this the first attempts at greater stringency, simplification, and general expression of 1924.¹³ Here, as in his Christmas letter to Helma, Schwitters stated that his second period focused on furthering this research into the ways composition and materials mutually constitute an image. By the mid-1920s the found object had ceased to play as prominent a role in his work while he attempted to extrapolate the lessons of his early Merz technique to abstract oil painting and sculptural relief (see plate 12). As has often been noted, Schwitters’s pictorial work became more stringent in form following his participation in the International Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists in Weimar in September 1922. Any affinity to Dada’s messy concatenations of consumer detritus appeared to give way to cleaner lines, carefully delineated fields of color, and crisp geometries that dynamized symmetry and the structure of the grid.¹⁴ However, Schwitters understood this work less in terms of stylistic change and rather more as an ongoing refinement of his Merz technique, one that internalized the lessons that composing with the materials of mass culture had taught him so that he might commit himself fully to a rigorously abstract mode of picturing, free of facile imitation and resistant to interpretive closure.

During his third period that Schwitters described to Helma, he extended his Merz technique, merging collage with abstraction into every conceivable medium, culminating with his creation of his Merzbau. In the late 1920s he also disseminated his thoughts on the relationship between composition and material through numerous partnerships with other artists and groups. Indeed, his closest collaborators were as diverse as his choice of materials and medium: Hans Arp, Theo van Doesburg, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, El Lissitzky, László Moholy-Nagy, and Jan Tschichold, to name but a few of the most well-known. He expended inexhaustible energy in concert with several organizations that vitally shaped the artistic culture of Central Europe between the world wars, such as the Bauhaus, De Stijl, and the German Werkbund, and he contributed to scores of the wildly diverse little magazines that cropped up in the interwar years, including MA, Blok, Pásmo, De Stijl, G, i 10, transition, The Little Review, and abstraction, création, art non-figuratif. In the waning years of the Weimar Republic, Schwitters’s astonishing dexterity as a networker provided him a vital outlet for expression, both as an artist and as a theorist of art. His reach extended from local associations, such as die abstrakten hannover and the regional chapter of the Reichsverband Bildender Künstler (Imperial Union of Fine Artists), to the United States and Japan. Yet the international scope of this practice soon gave way to a life of extraterritoriality and exile.¹⁵

On January 30, 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of the German government, and he ruled by presidential decree until new elections could be held in March. In these weeks of the rapid consolidation of Nazi power and the collapse of the Republic, Schwitters and his peers found their artistic activities immediately and radically circumscribed and their work publicly denigrated. On February 25, mere days before the Reichstag fire that catalyzed the establishment of a police state, the chief organ of the Nazi Party, the Völkischer Beobachter, published a screed against modern art and architecture, outlining three objectionable categories: mathematical Constructivism, the art of psychopaths, and art with the intent to depreciate all values and glorify that of little value. This last group was explicitly conceived with Schwitters in mind, whose glued-together pictures of nails, wood-wool, scraps of newspaper, glass shards, feathers, and tram tickets—that according to the judgment of one art historian (!) are ‘often of bewitching charm’—we gladly refuse as an artistic expression of the German soul.¹⁶ In addition to being both mentally and ethically unsound, Schwitters ranked among prominent artists (mainly with ties to the Bauhaus) who were deemed un-German, specifically Jews, communists, and those with origins in the East. As Helma recounted to Hannah Höch: "We got ourselves the said Völkischer Beobachter: nice, huh? . . . Kurt will no longer publicly show new ideas and artistic things here at all; he still exhibits only naturalistic pictures here, in order to earn money so that he can continue to work for himself alone."¹⁷

Under the Nazi regime, Schwitters was notoriously denounced as a degenerate artist for the first time in the 1935 Easter issue of Neues Volk, a monthly periodical published by the party’s Racial Policy division. Two of his works were reproduced in a feature article titled Conquered ‘Art’ celebrating the first Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art) exhibition, which originated in Dresden and toured to twelve German cities from September 23, 1933, to March 29, 1936. A photograph of Das Ringbild (1920/21), printed at an angle, partially obscured a detail of Das Merzbild (1919) taken as an unidentified person lifted its wire netting away from its collaged support (fig. 1).¹⁸ Both assemblages, purchased by Paul Schmidt for the Stadtmuseum Dresden in 1920 and 1921 respectively, were officially confiscated in 1935, though they were included in the defamatory exhibition from the first. Together with graffiti inscriptions of An Anna Blume and his aphorism, Alles, was ein Künstler spuckt, ist Kunst (Everything that an artist spits is art), they quickly became representative works for the tour and its second, more infamous reincarnation, which opened in Munich on July 19, 1937, after he had already abandoned Germany for good.¹⁹

Government authorities were most outraged by the utter disregard Merz appeared to exhibit for both an economy predicated on the use value of goods and the conventions that shored up the exchange value of commodities. Schwitters’s refusal to accept any authority for value outside of his own creative expression—be it the purposeful origins of the detritus he employed or the unspoken norms that choreographed consumer desire—made his art an exemplary negative image against which Nazi ideology could define itself:

When the lack of ideas becomes so great that it takes on the task of the central idea itself, then there emerges irredeemable and unconditional art-garbage. Brass rings, wood, cork, linoleum, paste, nails, cigarette cartons, cotton, and price tags are, in themselves, useful and perhaps, in isolated cases, also very beautiful things. It would be conceivable to assemble a whimsical