Kurt Schwitters: Merz (2016) – Norman Rosenthal interviews Damien Hirst

KURT SCHWITTERS: I URGENTLY RECOMMEND THAT EVERYBODY BUY THEIR CHRISTMAS PRESENTS NOW· by Norman Rosenthal
world observed, yet it is forever subjectively
hermetic – an art that never allows the viewer
totally to unlock its secrets. At the time of his
death in January 1948 in the unlikely Lake
District town of Kendal in the north west of
England, Schwitters was all but unknown and
forgotten and in the words of Fred Uhlman, an
artist friend he’d met in the internment camp
on the Isle of Man, ”He died […] in poverty
trying to sell his collages for a pound apiece“. 3
But it seems Schwitters never doubted his own
importance as a significant artist of his time.
One of his first apologists in West
Germany after the Second World War was
the art historian and museum director Werner
Schmalenbach. Schmalenbach maintained
that Schwitters, unlike the largely Berlin-based
Dadaistic artists – whether Georg Grosz
or John Heartfield, not to mention his close
friend Richard Huelsenbeck or even his great
supporter Herwarth Walden, editor of the
avant-garde magazine and gallery Der Sturm –
saw art not as a political tool but as “a spiritual
function of Man, whose point is to release
him from the chaos of life (tragedy)” and that
“the subsuming of oneself in art approaches
divine service in freeing man of the cares of
everyday life!” 4 We are already anticipating
the first Merzbau that was to be his cathedral.
Ultimately, for Schwitters Merz is form. There is
no need to remind the reader of the origin of
the word Merz that arose out of the new world
full of optimism and destruction that engulfed
Europe, and most especially Germany, in
1919, and that became his unique trademark.
Nor in his biography was there any shortage
of melancholy and tragedy, even if in the years
between 1919 and 1933 Schwitters enjoyed
considerable fame in the world of Weimar
Germany.
3
Fred Uhlman, The Making of an Englishman, Victor Gollancz Ltd,
London 1960, p. 239.
4
Kurt Schwitters exhibition catalogue, galerie gmurzynska, Cologne
1978, p. 27.
142
He made hundreds, if not thousands,
of magnificent collages, large and small,
but surely his greatest achievements were in
his conception and realisation of the three
Merzbauten. The largest and most elaborate of
these was built in his house in an anonymous
street in Hanover, Waldhausenstrasse – later
destroyed by an inevitable bomb attack in
1943. He was to name it his Kathedrale des
Erotischen Elends – the Cathedral of Erotic
Misery. Cathedrals are essentially public
spaces but it’s unclear how many individuals,
aside from his immediate family, ever saw
this essentially secret interior. However, in the
famous exhibition staged by Alfred J. Barr at
the Museum of Modern Art in 1936, Fantastic
Art, Dada, Surrealism, two photographs of it
illustrated the catalogue. One, titled The Gold
Grotto (1925), the other, The Blue Window
(1933), indicates the continual work-in-progress
of this unique work. In fact, it seems that no less
than seven other photographs were exhibited
alongside full collages from 1920 and 1922.
Interior of Well’s Cathedral
© Historic England Archive