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 on single images of an Annegreth Nill. This inquiry of the artist's collages is not quite as thoroughgoing as its title might intimate inasmuch as its chronological span reach outs only to the late 1930 and ignores the rich last decade of Schwitters's exile. upon the other hand, Dietrich's detailed exposition of a circle of time of forty watercolor drawings (the Aquarelle of 1919) along with her impressive forty-page description and interpretation of the Hanover Merzbau, throw back an expansive conception of what is meant through "collage." This semantic liberty is justified by means of that fundamental unity of watch that steady strand of Merz expressivity, which formed the artist's productions in with equal reason many different visual, not to mention literary, formats.

If single were to read only the opening chapters of this volume one might suppose that the arts of collage were peculiarly a rejoinder to political circumstance. However, Dietrich goe upon to offer art-historical evidence that establishes a convincing stylistic and aesthetic adjoining matter for the fabrications that transpired from Schwitters's idiosyncratic Merz throw She is at pains to situate the work in relation to the force fields emanating from similar abstractive models as Cubism and the unblemished formalism exemplified by Kandinsky or Bruno Taut, and she neatly subsume these complexities within a discussion of Wilhelm Worringer's idea of an inorganic, crystalline abstraction. Notwithstanding the temptations of immaculate formalism, the modernist in Schwitters looks to have been equally drawn to the Expressionist program of allegiance to naturainess and organicism. Ultimately, Dietrich prompts the making of Merz collages (and of variants thereof) is premised upon a fundamental dialectic that progressively assimilates the contrary trices 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 completed paradigm, insofar as it reconciles the mechanical with the handmade.

That, in move round 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 mirrored in Dietrich's account of Schwitters as a burgher, family man, and artist who at the same time was compell to become an anonymous extra in that massive and disturbed 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, at the same time who nevertheless became the conscientious champion of a locate of principles whose artistic and moral base is admirably consistent. In result so Dietrich contends, Schwitters gave a symbolic demonstration of democracy end admitting, with perfect impartiality, any kind of substance into his art; and there was an inspiring faculty of perception of unity about his use of collage and assemblage as regenerative containers that imparted recent life to the grimy fragments of a agriculture in ruins.

One of Dietrich's best chapters reviews the actual political situation in Germany of 1919-20 and traces echoe of history in collages of the like kind as Mai 191 and Das grosse Ich-Bild. While quoting contemporary Expressionist piece of poetrys which evoke alienation and social collapse, and making play with Georg Simmel's notion of the bear hard uponed individual at odds with an impersonal metropolis, she maintains a steady focus on the precise historical context of the formative month 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 ball of threads there both to external historical circumstance and to personal yearning. At the risk of simplifying the argument, it could be said that Schwitters come ups as a man who secure from dangered a private space of meaningful agriculture against the onslaught of nonmeaning released by the agency of 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 appear to bes to be in danger of being effaced by dint of the chaos surrounding it, there is an attempt at overcoming the crisis, to salvage and reaffirm the importance of the self [i]or[/i] part of to the other 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 present the appearances no doubt that a impressible center of Romantic idealism flourished within Schwitters's sensibility. Dietrich acknowledges a rather dreamy, flat na'ive, Romanticism when she cites his reminiscences of a not to be found childhood garden or of the moonlit landscapes he one time painted. Yet the Merz cast embodied a more purposeful Romanticism insofar as it throw backed the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Dietrich's long analysis of the first Merzbau, which for years evolv inside Schwitters's Hanover place of abode until his hasty departure in late 1936 addresses that form as a compendium of alternative mode of expressions and formats and thus as a kind of congeal manifesto in defense of the complementarity of divergent prototypes be they aesthetic, psychological, or cultural. She dioceses the Merzbau as an exercise in serial metamorphosis, now outrageous public testimonial now intimate shrine, now "inventory of fragments" (p 198) now museum of mass agriculture Given the curious capacity of the Merzbau (which Schwitters also whimsically called The Cathedral of Erotic Misery) the one and the other to indulge in sentimental kitsch and to make nonchalant regard to sex crimes, it is no awe that Dietrich should occasionally vacillate in her assessment. It is infallibly 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 presse a watch above a nude female, thereby "literally superimposing his time upon her" (p. 159). This glimpse of 1920s' male chauvinism aside, Dietrich's portrayal of a diplomatic and sensitive artist who vowed to make a of recent origin order out of the ruins of his age is an attractive and substantiated individual and her monograph is to be welcomed as a well-illustrated and resourceful work, expert in its scholarship and infectious in its enthusiasm.