Kurt Schwitters

- The Art Pioneer Who Ended His Days In Cumbria

By Margaret Brecknell

Compelled to flee Nazi Germany for no other crime than being an artist, Kurt Schwitters died in a Kendal hospital 75 years ago this month, far from his native land.

He was born in the German city of Hanover on 20th June 1887, the only child of a middle-class family. He studied art, as a teenager, at the city’s School of Applied Arts before, in 1909, being recommended by his tutor to attend Dresden’s Academy of Fine Arts.

Two years later, four of his pictures were exhibited for the first time at an art gallery in Hanover, but it wasn’t all plain sailing for the budding artist. Shortly afterwards, Schwitters applied to study art at the Berlin Academy, but following a short probation period was rejected as being “untalented”. Despite this knockback, Schwitters continued his training in Dresden and his work began to appear regularly at exhibitions in his native Hanover.

Following the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Schwitters returned full-time to Hanover. The following year, he married Helma Fischer and the couple set up home in a flat on the second floor of his parents’ house. Schwitters had suffered from epilepsy since early childhood, which meant that for the early years of the war he was excused from active military service. He was eventually called up in March 1917, but was declared unfit and was instead sent to work as a technical draughtsman at an ironworks just outside Hanover.

Schwitters’ early artwork was influenced by the German Expressionist movement. This style may be best described in layman’s terms as art in

which the image of reality is altered and exaggerated in order to reflect the artist’s emotional reaction to what they are painting. Following the end of the war, however, Schwitters began to experiment in a different medium.

His first abstract collages appeared in late 1918. Assembled from wastepaper and other pieces of scrap material found in the street, Schwitters described these works as Merz. He came up with this term for his own unique style of art after spotting an advertisement for a local bank called the “Commerz” on a piece of scrap paper used in one of his early collages. “I could see no reason why used tram tickets, bits of driftwood, buttons and old junk from attics and rubbish heaps should not serve well as materials for paintings; they suited the purpose just as well as factory-made paints”, Schwitters later recalled.

Before long, Schwitters was experimenting with ever larger collages. He created his first Merzbau (or Merz building) at his own family home in Hanover, transforming part of the interior of the house into a series of sculptural installations made from found materials. This was a constantly evolving large-scale project on which he worked for 15 years or more until circumstances dictated that he could do so no longer.

By the early 1930s, Schwitters was a well-known figure on the German art scene, but trouble was brewing. In 1933, his artwork was included in a touring exhibition of Degenerate Art organised by the Nazi Party. Hitler and his associates were outspoken critics of the modern art movement, advocating instead a return to more traditional artistic forms. The Degenerate Art exhibition was intended to “educate” the German public on the immoral nature of modern art, whilst at the same time ridiculing the artists involved. Soon Schwitters’ work was no longer exhibited in regular art shows.

In August 1936, two close artist friends of Schwitters, Christof and Luise Spengemann, were arrested by the Gestapo in Hanover and subsequently imprisoned. Schwitters’ own 18-year-old son, Ernst, who was a talented photographer, also risked arrest after joining a youth resistance group and late that same year fled Germany for Norway. The Schwitters had regularly holidayed there as a family in the past. Schwitters followed his son there a matter of days later after being summoned for an “interview” by the Gestapo.

Schwitters set up home in the Norwegian town of Lysaker, not far from Oslo. Here he began work on another Merzbau project, which he called the Haus am Bakken (House on the Hill). His wife, Helma, remained in Hanover to look after their business interests and gradually arrangements were made for the artist’s most important works to be shipped to Lysaker for safekeeping. In July 1939, Helma visited her husband and son in Norway. War broke out a few weeks later and they never saw each other again.

In April 1940, German military forces invaded Norway. Schwitters was compelled to abandon his second Merzbau project (which was subsequently destroyed by fire) and was forced to go on the run again, accompanied by his son and new daughter-in-law. They fled to the far north of the country, from where they escaped by boat to Scotland on board a Norwegian icebreaker.

Schwitters may have been compelled to flee his homeland because of Nazi persecution, but, as a German national arriving in the UK, he was treated as an “enemy alien” and transported to a nearby internment camp. He was eventually sent to the Isle of Man where he was held at Hutchinson Square Camp, close to the island’s capital of Douglas, along with around 1200 other internees from Germany and Austria. These included an extraordinarily high number of artists, writers and musicians, all of whom had fled their homes because of fear of Nazi reprisals.

Despite the unpromising situation in which they found themselves, Schwitters and his fellow artists established their own creative community within the Hutchinson Square Camp. They even held their

Portrait of Erich Kahn at the Hutchinson Square Camp by Kurt Schwitters

own exhibitions with the support of the camp commander, who was himself an art enthusiast. Bearing in mind the lack of materials, Schwitters’ output during this period was quite phenomenal. The German artist made full use of his wellhoned talent for recycling the seemingly most unpromising bits of scrap paper to create unique collages. He even crafted sculptures out of porridge (unsurprisingly, none of these have survived). He also produced many paintings, including landscapes inspired by his time in Norway and portraits of his fellow detainees.

Schwitters applied for release on several occasions, but without success. “I am now the last artist here – all the others are free”, he wrote to his wife in April 1941. “But all things are equal. If I stay here, then I have plenty to occupy myself. If I am released, then I will enjoy freedom”. He was finally released, in November 1941, after 16 months in the Isle of Man camp.

Schwitters moved to London, where he lived in a boarding house in Paddington. Here he met the young English woman who would subsequently become his partner. Edith Thomas, aka “Wantee”, was some 30 years his junior. The affectionate nickname was inspired by her very British habit of asking him, “Want tea?”.

The couple holidayed in the Lake District during September 1942. Following the end of the war, they went to live in Ambleside on a permanent basis. By this time Helma Schwitters had died of cancer in Hanover. Schwitters was himself far from well by this stage, having suffered a stroke in April 1944, so had given up any hope of following his son, Ernst, who had returned to Norway. Perhaps, the lakes and the mountains of the Lake District reminded him of the Norwegian landscape which may explain why he chose to settle there.

The German artist was regarded as an eccentric figure by the locals, who were unaware of his earlier illustrious career. By and large, he eked out a living from portrait and landscape painting, but also began what proved to be his final Merzbau project.

In 1946, Schwitters rented a small stone barn on Cylinders Farm near Elterwater to use as an art studio, having spotted the building when he was invited to paint the portrait of the estate owner, Harry Pierce. His former family home in Hanover had been badly bombed during World War II and the artist’s extensive Merzbau installation there catastrophically damaged. Schwitters had applied for a grant from the Museum of Modern Art in New York to fund a restoration project. However, it soon became clear that restoration was out of the question.

In March 1947, the artist wrote to his son, Ernst, “I will suggest starting a new Merzbau here in England or in USA. I simply have to live as long as necessary as for a new Merzbau.” Soon afterwards, the Museum of Modern Art offered him a grant of $3000 to commence a new project.

Autumn in Elterwater Valley, Lake District

Schwitters was already seriously ill by the time that work began on the Merz Barn at Elterwater during the summer of 1947. Sadly, he had only completed a fraction of the elaborate project which he had planned for the barn by the time he died a few months later, on 8th January 1948. Eventually, nearly two decades later, the wall on which this artwork had been created was transferred intact to the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle, where it remains on display.

Shortly before his death, Schwitters remarked perceptively that, “No-one knows who I am now, but in 60 years they will”. Perhaps the German artist’s experimental collages were just too avant-garde to be fully appreciated during the era in which he worked. Certainly by the time of his death he had largely faded into obscurity, not helped by the political turmoil in his homeland and his enforced exile. Happily, today he is regarded as one of the 20th-century art world’s most innovative and influential figures, whose work has inspired everyone from the pop artists of the 1950s and 1960s (think, Andy Warhol et al) to modern British artists like Damien Hirst and Antony Gormley.

It would all be too easy to marvel at the extraordinary way in which Kurt Schwitters was persecuted by the Nazi regime during the late 1930s, simply because it objected to his avant-garde style of art, and think that this could never happen today. Sadly, the opposite is true. A “State of Artistic Freedom” report recently revealed that last year well over 100 artists from all around the globe were imprisoned, or, in a few cases, even killed, by regimes intent on silencing artistic expression. 

Above: 1987 German stamp commemorating Kurt Schwitters