The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition and Innovation. - book reviews

As a contribution to anglophone criticism of the work of Kurt Schwitters, Dorothea Dietrich's monograph adopts an approach midway between the panoramic inclusiveness of a John Elderfield and the sharp focus upon single images of an Annegreth Nill. This study of the artist's collages is not quite as thoroughgoing as its title might suggest, inasmuch as its chronological span extends only to the late 1930s and ignores the rich last decade of Schwitters's exile. On the other hand, Dietrich's detailed exposition of a cycle of forty watercolor drawings (the Aquarelle of 1919), along with her impressive forty-page description and interpretation of the Hanover Merzbau, reflect an expansive conception of what is meant by "collage." This semantic liberty is justified by that fundamental unity of outlook, that steady strand of Merz expressivity, which formed the artist's productions in so many different visual, not to mention literary, formats.

If one were to read only the opening chapters of this book, one might suppose that the arts of collage were peculiarly a response to political circumstance. However, Dietrich goes on to offer art-historical evidence that establishes a convincing stylistic and aesthetic context for the fabrications that transpired from Schwitters's idiosyncratic Merz project. She is at pains to situate the work in relation to the force fields emanating from such abstractive models as Cubism and the pure formalism exemplified by Kandinsky or Bruno Taut, and she neatly subsumes these complexities within a discussion of Wilhelm Worringer's idea of an inorganic, crystalline abstraction. Notwithstanding the temptations of pure formalism, the modernist in Schwitters seems to have been equally drawn to the Expressionist program of allegiance to naturainess and organicism. Ultimately, Dietrich suggests, the making of Merz collages (and of variants thereof) is premised on a fundamental dialectic that progressively assimilates the contrary moments of the inorganic and the organic, the abstract and the natural, a dialectic of which the paper collage itself may be taken to be the perfect paradigm, insofar as it reconciles the mechanical with the handmade.

That, in turn, each of the paper collages (Merzzeichnungen) or junk assemblages (Merzbilder) which Schwitters made in Hanover registers the collision of individual aspiration and collective experience is reflected in Dietrich's account of Schwitters as a burgher, family man, and artist who at the same time was compelled to become an anonymous extra in that massive and turbulent epic known as the Weimar Republic. She paints a consistent portrait of a maverick who avoided direct party-political activity and kept a careful distance from Richard Huelsenbeck and the noisier Dadaists of Berlin, yet who nevertheless became the conscientious champion of a set of principles whose artistic and moral base is admirably consistent. In effect, so Dietrich contends, Schwitters gave a symbolic demonstration of democracy through admitting, with perfect impartiality, any kind of substance into his art; and there was an inspiring sense of unity about his use of collage and assemblage as regenerative containers that imparted fresh life to the grimy fragments of a culture in ruins.

One of Dietrich's best chapters reviews the actual political situation in Germany of 1919-20, and traces echoes of history in collages such as Mai 191 and Das grosse Ich-Bild. While quoting contemporary Expressionist poems which evoke alienation and social collapse, and making play with Georg Simmel's notion of the oppressed individual at odds with an impersonal metropolis, she maintains a steady focus upon the precise historical context of the formative months of the Weimar Republic, with all the turmoil of workers' strikes and multiparty activism, and she measures with fascinating clarity the angle of emphasis that the artist adopted as he positioned his scraps of newsprint and fabric, and left clues there both to external historical circumstance and to personal yearning. At the risk of simplifying the argument, it could be said that Schwitters emerges as a man who defended a private space of meaningful culture against the onslaught of nonmeaning released by the disintegration of mass experience: for, within the tiny confines of the collage, "the self is shown in tension with the materialist world; and although the self seems to be in danger of being effaced by the chaos surrounding it, there is an attempt at overcoming the crisis, to salvage and reaffirm the importance of the self through the act of inscription" (p. 123).

A three-dimensional replica of Schwitters's first Merzbau was given pride of place in the traveling exhibition "The Romantic Spirit in German Art" (at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 1994), and there seems no doubt that a soft center of Romantic idealism flourished within Schwitters's sensibility. Dietrich acknowledges a rather dreamy, even na'ive, Romanticism when she quotes his reminiscences of a lost childhood garden or of the moonlit landscapes he once painted. Yet the Merz project embodied a more purposeful Romanticism insofar as it reflected the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Dietrich's lengthy analysis of the first Merzbau, which for years evolved inside Schwitters's Hanover home until his hasty departure in late 1936, addresses that structure as a compendium of alternative styles and formats and thus as a kind of concrete manifesto in defense of the complementarity of divergent models, be they aesthetic, psychological, or cultural. She sees the Merzbau as an exercise in serial metamorphosis, now outrageous public monument, now intimate shrine, now "inventory of fragments" (p. 198), now museum of mass culture. Given the curious capacity of the Merzbau (which Schwitters also whimsically called The Cathedral of Erotic Misery) both to indulge in sentimental kitsch and to make nonchalant reference to sex crimes, it is no wonder that Dietrich should occasionally vacillate in her assessment. It is surely salutary that she should criticize the way Schwitters images women, as in that icon of male dominion the 1921 collage Frau-Uhr, where a male hand presses a watch over a nude female, thereby "literally superimposing his time on her" (p. 159). This glimpse of 1920s' male chauvinism aside, Dietrich's portrayal of a subtle and sensitive artist who vowed to make a new order out of the ruins of his age is an attractive and substantiated one, and her monograph is to be welcomed as a well-illustrated and resourceful work, deft in its scholarship and infectious in its enthusiasm.