I was fortunate enough to go to university in the vibrant London of the mid-to-late 1960s. My tuition fees were paid by Lancashire County Council, I got a subsistence allowance and even a book allowance. British Rail had a delivery service for students, whereby you could drop off your trunk at the local station and have it delivered to your university address.
60’s Pop music and artistic expressions shaped my era
It was the “pop” music which provided the excitement in that era of confidence and hope, when The Rolling Stones, The Who, Kinks could all be seen live at small local venues in London.
But at a more elevated intellectual level, it was the discovery, or more accurately, re-discovery of challenging forms of artistic expressions which formed the 1960s counterculture – Dada, Pop Art, Performative Arts, Happenings, Sound Poems and Collages found a new and young following. Friends and I organized poetry and jazz evenings, set up Happenings and adorned the venues with our own collages at our London University college in leafy Hampstead.
I used the term “rediscovery”, for such it was, and much traceable to the innovatory German artist, Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), whose own life was as dramatic as his art.
Kurt Schwitters
Schwitters was born into a wealthy property owning family which allowed him to concentrate on his creative activities. Born in Hanover, Schwitters studied art at the Dresden Academy.
The First World War had a profound effect on German culture, neatly illustrated by the transition of Schwitters and his fellow graduates of the Dresden Academy, Otto Dix and George Grosz from post-Impressionism to Expressionism. Such artists were no longer satisfied with giving their ‘impressions’ but wished to demonstrate their ‘expressions’ of the world around them. They also took inspiration from the more anarchic Dada movement.
As an incidental travel tip, such evolutions are exhibited in the excellent modern German art section of the ‘Albertinum’ in Dresden.
WWI changed his art
Schwitters suffered from epilepsy, which meant he was unfit for military service and so he was saved from the slaughter of WWI. Instead he was conscripted to work in a factory and the experience stayed with him and found expression as machinery features in many of his creations. The horrors of war marked his generation and as the 1920s saw the irresistible rise of the Nazis, the art of Schwitters and his contemporaries became darker. Though Schwitters was never as overtly political as others, he too fell under the suspicion and hostility of the Nazis, who, when they took power in 1933, immediately launched a campaign against ‘Degenerate Art’, in effect abstract art. Instead the Nazis promoted their idyllic and kitsch version of German virtues.
Schwitters had begun in the 1920s to present and promote his unique ‘Merz’ art style. Briefly, this innovation was based on the Dadaist concept of collages of random ‘found objects’ (objets trouves).
He escaped the Nazi regime but was interned in the UK
His home city of Hanover had proven a sympathetic base, Schwitters used some of his family properties to display his ‘Merz’ works. Under Nazi pressure, the city of Hanover cancelled his contracts and the Nazis called him in for an interview. Schwitters fled to Norway, where he continued to work and display his art. Schwitters left his wife behind in Hanover, to manage the family properties.
In April 1940 the Nazis invaded Norway and Schwitters was interned on the isolated Lofoten Islands. He escaped occupied Norway to Scotland, where he arrived in June 1940, only to find himself interned once more.
All foreign nationals were interned after the outbreak of WW2, many of whom in the roughest of places, in Schwitters’ case, a derelict factory in Bury, Lancashire. Schwitters was moved on to the Hutchinson Square Camp on the Isle of Man, which quickly became known as the “artists’ camp”. (See my article ‘Internment in the North West.)
He moved to London and later to Ambleside
Schwitters cultivated an eccentric persona, sleeping under his bed and becoming a popular raconteur. Released in autumn 1941, he moved to London where he began a relationship with another woman, which lasted until his death.
Schwitters was now dogged by ill health and in 1944, after successive strokes, he was left partly paralyzed. In December of that same year the Modern Art Gallery in London exhibited his work but only one item was sold.
He had discovered the Lake District in June 1945 and finally moved to Ambleside, setting up a “Merz” display in Elterwater.
He died a British citizen
He died in January 1948, the day after he had been granted British citizenship.
He had been originally buried in the Lake District but in 1970 he gained honorable recognition in his native Germany, when his body was disinterred and was finally laid to rest in his home town in Hanover.
Schwitters is now rightly regarded as the progenitor of multimedia art.
This article was originally published on Substack. Read the original article here.
