CHAPTER WEE

I felt liberated and wanted to exclaim my joy to the world. I was thrifty and used whatever I could find. After all, we were an impoverished country. You can also shout using garbage, and that’s what I did, by gluing and nailing it together. I called this Merz. It was my prayer to celebrate the victorious end of the war; for once again peace had triumphed. Everything was broken anyway, so the task was to build something new from the shards. I painted, nailed, glued, wrote poems….

—Kurt Schwitters, “Facts from My Life.”     

Transformations.

In 1921, Kurt Schwitters was already famous for his elegant parody love poem, An Anna Blume (“Blue is the color of thy yellow hair….”). While rehearsing in Hannah Höch’s Berlin apartment with Höch and Raoul Hausmann, in preparation for a Prague performance, Schwitters showed his poem, Alphabet von Hinten (“Alphabet in Reverse”). Hausmann called it “the first step to a sound poem,” and pulled out a copy of one of his 1918 Plakatgedichte (poster-poems): a graphic found-art piece composed entirely of large-type letters, “fmsbwtözäu, pggiv-..? mü”—originally a print-shop type sample.

During the threesome’s Prague show, Anti-Dada, Hausmann performed the fmsbwtözäu letters. On the return trip to Germany Schwitters toyed with the sounds. Recalls Hausmann, “He did not stop all day…it became a bit much.” In its early versions, Schwitters titled Ur Sonata “Portrait of Raoul Hausmann.”

Decades later, in 1946, from exile in the English Lake District, Schwitters reached out to Hausmann by mail; the two collaborated on a poetry journal called PIN, for “Poetry Intervenes Now” and “Presence Is New.” The effort was cut short by Schwitters’ illness, but Kurt Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann and the Story of PIN was published in 1962 by two Polish émigrés Schwitters had met in London, filmmakers Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, later the founders of Gaberbocchus Press. The PIN book’s promo copy read, “TWO FAMOUS DADAISTS OF THE ‘TWENTIES WROTE THIS BOOK IN THE ‘FORTIES gaberbocchus PUBLISHES IT IN THE ‘SIXTIES and hopes IT WILL BE READ IN THE ‘EIGHTIES.” The Gaberbocchus PIN was edited by the Themersons’ niece, Jasia Reichardt.

The Beatles’ album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in 1967, featuring a collaged album-cover created by English pop artist Peter Blake, who had discovered collage fifteen years earlier, when he was in art school. Blake’s roommate Richard Smith had been dating Jasia Reichardt, a Kindertransport refugee taken in by relatives. Reichardt described collages created by her Uncle Stefan and Aunt Franciszka Themerson’s friend Kurt Schwitters. Smith told Blake; they began making collages.

Schwitters to Beatles.

The Beatles’ 1968 “White Album” cover was designed by pop artist Richard Hamilton, who had already played a critical role in Schwitters’ history. Hamilton in 1965 had organized the partial salvage of Schwitters’ third Merzbau, an English Lake District sculptural installation known as the Elterwater Merz Barn.

While assistant professor of art at Newcastle University, Hamilton had recruited students to extract the wall-mounted portion of this deteriorating assemblage from inside its stonework barn. Hamilton’s team had packed the Merzbau wall onto a truck, transported it one-hundred-twenty miles from the village of Elterwater, and installed it into Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University.

Hamilton’s “White Album” design included, packed within its austere blank jacket, a Schwitters-like poster collaging Beatles photos and memorabilia.

Schwitters to Beatles, again.

Like Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, many young artists of the fifties who were seeking an alternative to the dominant Abstract Expressionist style took inspiration from Kurt Schwitters’ abstract yet topical collages and absurdly humorous yet pointed poems and performances. Among Schwitters’ American proponents was Fluxus co-founder Dick Higgins—whose innovative coinage “intermedia” well described Schwitters’ discipline-busting practice (Higgins was father-in-law to Urchestra’s DJ Glove, AKA Joshua Selman). In the newsletter of his Something Else Press, Higgins explained Schwitters’ appeal to the new generation:

Shoes serve and wear out. From the moment they are put on the feet, they are always changing, until the time when their change makes them less serviceable, irreversibly so, and they are discarded.

So many of the artists became unhappy about [the] eternal, unyielding quality in their art, and they began to wish their work were more like shoes, more temporary, more human, more able to admit of the possibility of change. The fixed-finished work began to be supplemented by the idea of a work as a process, constantly becoming something else, tentative, allowing more than one interpretation. We see it in literature in the controlled ambiguities of Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, Kurt Schwitters.

Another American admirer was Monty Python’s Flying Circus collage-animator Terry Gilliam, and he wasn’t the only Schwitters-lover among the Pythons. In Monty Python’s very first episode, “Whither Canada”—broadcast October 5th, 1969—John Cleese plays a sports announcer breathlessly narrating a modern-artists’ bicycle race, colleague Michael Palin at his side.

Pepperpot (Michael Palin): That’s not Picasso—that’s Kandinsky.

Sam Trench (John Cleese): Good lord, you’re right. It’s Kandinsky. Wassily Kandinsky, and who’s this here with him? It’s Braque. Georges Braque, the cubist, painting a bird in flight over a cornfield and going very fast down the hill towards Kingston and—Piet Mondrian—just behind, Piet Mondrian the neoplasticist, and then a gap, then the main bunch, here they come, Chagall, Max Ernst, Miro, Dufy, Ben Nicholson, Jackson Pollock, and Bernard Buffet making a break on the outside here, Brancusi’s going with him, so’s de Chirico, Fernand Leger, Delaunay, De Kooning, Kokoschka’s dropping back here by the look of it, and so’s Paul Klee dropping back a bit and, right at the back of this group, our very own Kurt Schwitters.

Pepperpot: He’s German!

But Cleese’s claim was understandable: Schwitters wasn’t just a proto-Python, his application for British citizenship had finally been approved days before his death. On January 8th, 1948—with his English companion Wantee (Edith Thomas) by his side—Schwitters would have died an Englishman, if only he had lived to sign the paperwork.

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(Below, fast forward to Minute 14, Second 22 to watch the Modern Artists Bicycle Race)