Kurt Schwitter Episode #12: Merz Bau

Kurt Schwitter is ultimately an awe-inspiring artist from many disciplines, including Post Impressionism, Dada, Surrealism, poetry, and performance art from the 20th century. However, the work he created using sculptured spaces truly epitomizes and transfixes the human psyche into believing it is in an alternate reality. 

One of his most recognized works, Merz, was titled this, as in German it is the later part of the word Commerce he had seen in a magazine. This piece has been called a psychological collage of coherent fragments of what occupied Schwitters' mind at this time. 

Schwitters' artwork changed how observers saw their built world and what it represented at the time. There was plenty of political turmoil and social unrest during the first World War. A time where Schwitters' style became darker. This is where Schwitter was honing in on his craft as one the first installation artists. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Creatively Thinking Podcast. Join Carolyn Vitello as she uncovers the inspirations behind some incredibly creative minds that are orbiting our local communities. I was going to start just like every other sort of interview I've ever done with the Creatively Thinking with Carolyn B podcast, but but this one's different. I was going to go straight into another essay on an artist I've had admired from sort of the constructivist and Dadaist art movements. And I've been admiring him from afar for decades, never really looking any further than what art history classes had shown me. His name is Kurt Hermann Edvard Carl Julius Schwitters. What a mouthful. He was born in Hanover, Germany in 1897. His father owned a woman's clothing store, which they sold and bought some properties, which they rented and lived off of for the rest of Schwitter's life. They moved in 1893 to Waldstrasse, later renamed Waldhausenstrasse, the future site of his most famous work, Murr's Bau, an installation which we will get into shortly. In 1901, Schwitters suffered his first epileptic seizure. This condition would make him exempt from military service for the First World War until conscription requirements were loosened. What nearly knocked me over was the fact that he married his cousin. And I know times were different then, but it just seems like such a really stupid thing to have done. But then Albert Einstein did this, and the world still holds his successes and accomplishments in high regard. So I will do my best to ignore it and focus on his prolific and awe-inspiring work, especially his famous work, Murray's Bow. This installation was described as the psychology of Kurt's mind that occupied a large part of his home. Six rooms, in fact, at one point. This installation was revolutionary for the time. It was a construction of found objects that became picture planes of shapes, forms, and more precisely, a living and breathing cubist sculpture. And when I first discovered it in a textbook, this is exactly what I thought. It became a sort of Georges Brock 3D space with all of the inviting tints and tones to capture depth and perspective, as well as the sharp sharp white planes to define the boundaries. Some of this work actually contained works from artists like Georges Graus, Hannah Hock, Raoul Hausmann, and Sophie Tauber. I think that's how you say it. They were incorporated into the fabric of the installation with protruding tableau and angled surfaces. In his essay Ich Ein Mein and Ziel in MERS 21, Schwitters referred to the piece as Cathedral of Erotic Mis say that again Cathedral of Erotic Misery. Yet after 1930, he never referenced this title again. And the word Mersbau began being used in 1933. Schwitter's art took a direct shift in 1918 as a consequence of Germany's economic, political, and military collapse at the end of the First World War. Kurt first explored post-impressionism and then abstraction as he became acquainted with Raoul Hausmann in the autumn of 1918. He said I remember the night he introduced himself in the cafe de Westons. I am a painter, he said, and I nail my pictures together. And this is Hausmann speaking. Schitters still created expressionist style work until his death in 1948. His first abstract collage appeared in 1918 and was influenced by Jean Arp. He dubbed it MERS after a fragment from a private commercial bank. By the end of 1919, he had become a well-known artist after his one-man show at Der Stern Gallery in Berlin, and the publication of To Anna Flower, a Dadaist nonsensical poem. He returned to Hanover and began his artist career as a post-impressionist painter at the First World War. As the First World War progressed, Schwidder's style became darker and more of an expressionistic, distinct style. In the war things were in terrible turmoil, he said. What I had learned at the Academy, and this was the Dresden Academy that he attended, he said was of no use to me now, and the useful new ideas were still unready. Everything had broken down, and new things had to be made out of the fragments. And this is Murs. It was like a revolution within me. Not as it was, but as it should be. Schwitter's asked to join the Berlin Dadaist group, Hausman claimed, saying Husenbeck rejected him because of his link to De Stern and Expressionism, which were seen as hopeless hopelessly romantic and aesthetically obsessed, contrary to sort of the odd Dadaist ideals. Although Schwitter's did not directly participate in Berlin Dada, he was more closely connected with Zurich Dada, championing abstract and performance art rather than having a more political approach. As the political climate in Germany shifted, becoming more stable, so too did Schwitter's work become less influenced by Cubism and Expressionism. He began to organize and participate in lectures, touring with other avant-garde artists like Raoul Hausmann, Jean Arp, and Tristan Zara. Each was devoted to a central theme. For example, certain issues were a portfolio of prints of artists from that time, like Jean Arp and typesets by L. Lezitzki, or a children's book titled The Scarecrow, or The Ursinaut, Schwitter's early example of sound poetry that he performed and composed, translating to original sonata. Schwitters first performed it in 1925 and continued to extend and develop it, publishing notations for recital in the last Murr's periodical in 1932. Schwitters was wanted for an interview with Gestapo, and with this he fled to Norway to join his son Ernst, who had already left Germany in December of 1936. His wife Helma decided to stay in Germany to look after their four properties. The celebration of Schwitter's mother's 80th birthday was the last time they saw each other. Being exiled from 1937 to 1948 allowed Schwiders to continue exploring his creative practice, both in Norway and London, where he started a second Mersbau near Oslo. He abandoned it in 1940 when the Nazis invaded. And this Mersbau was actually destroyed in a fire in 1951. Following the Nazi invasion, Spitters fled to Scotland, where he was officially an enemy alien who was moved between internment camps, eventually arriving at the Isle of Man. The camp was soon known as the Artist Camp as there were many writers, artists, professors, and other intellectuals. They were situated as a collection of artists, sorry, they were situated as a collection of terraced houses around Hutchinson Square and Douglas. He was soon provided studio space where he took on students, many of whom would become significant artists in their own right. During his internment, he would produce 200 works, mainly portraits, which was more than he had done at any other time during his career. There was a shortage of art supplies in the early days of the camp, and this meant that the internees had to be resourceful. They used sardines to mix with brick dust to create paint, and linoleum cuts from the floor to be pressed into linoleo cut prints, and clay or even porridge for sculptures. The room stank, a musty, sour, indescribable stink, which came from three Dada sculptures, which he had created from porridge, no plaster of Paris being available. The porridge developed mildew, and the state and the statues were covered with greenish hair and bluish excrement of an unknown type of bacteria. This is an excerpt from Fred Ullman from his mech from his memoir. Schwitters was well liked by the camp members, but he did have some unusual habits of Dada's performances, sleeping under his bed and barking like a dog. And his epileptic condition, which had stayed dormant, returned, and his son attributed this to his suffering from depression because of his internment. He was constantly applying for release and obtained it in 1941. He promptly moved to London, where he hoped to build on the connections he had made in the camp. This was where he met his future wife in an addict flat. He asked her how to use the boiler, and that was that. She was half his age. In 1943, he learned that his MERS bow in Hanover had been destroyed, an Allied bombing. In April 1844, he suffered his first stroke at the age of 56, which left him temporarily paralyzed on one side of his body. His wife Helma died of cancer in October 1944, although Schwitters only heard of her death in December. Schwitters first visited the Lake District on holiday with Edith Thomas, his second partner, in September 1942. He moved there permanently. However, after a second stroke in February of the following year and further illness, he and Edith moved to a more easily accessible house. Schwitter created a sequence of proto-pop art pictures, such as for Kate, 1947, after the encouragement from his friend Kate Steins, I think. That's how you say it. Having emigrated to the United States in 1936, Steins sent Schmitter's letters describing life in the emerging consumer society and wrapped the letters and pages of comics to give a flavor of the new world, which she encouraged Schmitter's to MERS. In London, he exhibited in a number of galleries in the city, but little success at his at his first solo exhibition at the Modern Art Gallery in December 1944. And I was suspecting that this is because of there being no sort of direct translation of the style in Europe to the style appreciated in London. He had shown 40 works displayed and priced between 15 and 40 guineas, but only one was bought. During his time in London, Schwitter's work shifted towards an organic element that augmented the mass-produced sort of transients of previous years, with natural forms and muted colors. Pictures such as small MERS picture with many parts, 1945 to 46, for example, used objects found on a beach, including pebbles and smooth shards of porcelain. In March of 1947, Schwitters decided to recreate the MERS bow and found a suitable location in a barn at Cylinder's Farm in Lake District. And it was owned by Harry Pierce, whose portrait Schwitters had been commissioned to paint. Having been forced by a lack of other income to paint portraits and popular landscapes, popular landscape pictures to the local residents and tourists, Schwitters received notifications shortly before his 60th birthday that he had been awarded a thousand-pound fellowship to be transferred to him via the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in order to enable him to recreate his previous MERS construction in Germany or Norway. But this is the funny part. Instead, he used it for the MERS barn in El Torvada. And what is it, Altervada? Schwitters worked on the Murs barn daily, traveling the five miles between his home and the barn, except for when he became ill. And on January 7th, 1948, he had learned he had been granted British citizenship. Yet the following day, on January 8th, Schwitters died from an acute pulmonary edema. So that's really sad. You know, you get your citizenship and then you die like the next day. Oh my gosh. What's interesting is he was buried on the 10th of January in Ambleside, England. And his grave was unmarked until 1966, when a stone was erected with the inscription, Kurt Schwitters, creator of MERS. And so isn't that delightful? How what an artist has worked on throughout their life can ultimately be honored, even when the said artist has passed. Do you have something you have been working on for a lengthy period of time? Would you like to be remembered for it? You definitely will. This is proof of it. So thank you, Glorious Humanoids, for listening until the end. And please remember to like, share, comment, and we will see you next time. Join me next time as I go down another rabbit hole with another creative professional on their insights, their inspirations, and their ingenuity.