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

1921; and Mz 195 Das Eine (Mz 195 The One), 1921, are
included in the second “Entartete Kunst” exhibition. All
of the above are missing and presumed destroyed.
1938
Peggy Guggenheim, an American collector living in
London, borrows five works by Schwitters from Nelly van
Doesburg and includes them in “Exhibition of Collages,
Papiers-collés, and Photo-montages” in her London
gallery, Guggenheim-Jeune. When the war starts,
Guggenheim will return to the United States and show
Schwitters’s works at Art of This Century, her influential
gallery in New York.
In July, Schwitters’s work is included in “Exhibition of
Twentieth-Century German Art” at New Burlington
Galleries, London (organized in opposition to the
“Entartete Kunst” exhibitions), and in September—
October in “International nutidskunst. Konstruktivisme,
neoplasticime, abstract kunst, surrealisme,” Oslo.
1939
Poems and a drawing by Schwitters are included in
Homme que a perdu son squelette, the fourth volume
of Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s magazine of contemporary art,
Plastique, published in Paris.
“Art of Tomorrow” at the Museum of Non Objective
Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum),
New York, June, includes Schwitters’s work.
The next month, Helma Schwitters visits her husband in
Norway for the last time.
In September, Germany invades Poland, thus signaling
the beginning of World War II. Great Britain and France
declare war on Germany.
“Some New Forms of Beauty” at George Walter Vincent
Smith Art Gallery, Springfield, Massachusetts, November
9—December 17, includes Relief with Red Segment; the
exhibition travels to Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford,
Connecticut, January 4 - February 4, 1940.
1940-41
At the beginning of 1940, with the help of Steinitz,
Schwitters unsuccessfully attempts to procure an
American visa.
When German troops invade Norway in April 1940,
Schwitters; his son, Ernst; and Ernst’s wife, Esther,
flee over a period of several weeks to Great Britain. The
Schwitterses are interned in various detention camps
in Scotland and England for the remainder of 1940 and
through the end of 1941. Schwitters writes a poem about
the experience titled “Flucht” (Flight).
In one such camp, Hutchinson Camp, Schwitters is able
to set up a studio where he makes collages, sculpture,
and portraits of other detainees, He also stages recitals
(which include “Silence,” the first poem he wrote in
English) and publishes in the internees’ journal, The
Camp.
In December 1941 he is released from internment and
moves to London. He meets Edith Thomas (nicknamed
“Wantee”), who later becomes his companion.
Dreier and Duchamp retire the Société Anonyme in
1941 and donate its collection, including several pieces
by Schwitters, to the Yale University Art Gallery, New
Haven, Connecticut. Upon Dreier’s death in 1952,
her personal art collection is bequeathed to important
public collections; works by Schwitters go to the
Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Musum, New York; and the Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
1942
Schwitters continues to compose poetry, in English,
until the end of his life, having renounced the German
language during the war.
Schwitters’s works continue to find audience in the U.S.;
five are included in “The Exhibition of the Collection of
the Société Anonyme—Museum of Modern Art: 1920,”
Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut,
January 12—February 22; and three in the ongoing
exhibition of Peggy Guggenheim’s collection, “Art of
This Century; Objects—Drawings—Photographs—
Paintings—Sculpture—Collages 1910—1942,” Art of This
Century, New York, October 21, 1942—June 1947.
1943-45
Peggy Guggenheim includes Schwitters’s work in
“Exhibition of Collage” at Art of This Century, New York,
April 16—May 5, 1943.
The family home of the Schwitterses in Hanover,
together with the Merzbau, is destroyed by Allied bombs
on October 8 and 9, 1943.
In April 1944, Schwitters suffers a stroke and is
temporarily paralyzed on one side of his body. Helma
Schwitters dies of cancer in Hanover on October 29.
Schwitters does not learn of her death until December.
Schwitters is the focus of a one-man exhibition at the
Modern Art Gallery, London, December1944. Herbert
Read contributes an introduction and essay to the
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