My research focuses on the life and work of the German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948). Schwitters lived and worked in Hannover until he fled to Norway in early 1937. During the Nazi invasion of 1940 he managed to escape to Britain, and he died in Kendal, in the North of England, in 1948.
Schwitters was associated with many European avant-garde groups during the 1920s and although he is best known as an artist today, in his time he was also a journalist and prolific author (his literary work covers five volumes), publisher, cabaret artist and composer. In addition he ran a successful advertising agency and was one of the leading typographers of his age. He travelled extensively and had a wide circle of friends and supporters both in Europe and the US. Almost all these activities came to an end with the collapse of the Weimar Republic, when Schwitters came under increasing threat as a ‘degenerate’ artist. In exile, with his reputation ruined, and with little opportunity of earning a living wage in Norway and Britain, he lived in poverty for the remainder of his life. Today Schwitters is recognised as the 20th century’s great master of collage and as the precursor of many post-1945 art movements such as Pop Art, Fluxus and conceptual and installation art.
From the early 1920s until he left Germany, Schwitters worked on an extraordinary three-dimensional construction that came to be known as the Merzbau. Situated in the family home in Hannover, by 1936 this complex work had spread to at least six rooms of the house, possibly more. In exile he created similar structures, one in his garden in Lysaker, near Oslo, another in a barn in the Lake District. Schwitters realised that these works were unprecedented in their time, and in exile was desperate to ensure that one would survive for posterity. The Merzbauten in Hannover and Oslo were completely destroyed, however, while the barn in the Lake District remained incomplete on his death. Futhermore, little else has survived of his remaining experiments into what we would now call Environments or installation art.
As the primary research into these works was undertaken in the 1970s and 1980s, it was greatly in need of updating, particularly in the light of extensive archive material that passed to the Sprengel Museum in Hannover in 1993. My dissertation has involved a good deal of detective work, as I have attempted to compile as much information as possible on the Merzbauten from plans of their location, eyewitness reports, personal correspondence and contemporary photos. From this body of evidence, it becomes clear that after Schwitters’ death, numerous misunderstandings, inaccuracies and plain errors about the Merzbauten soon became widespread, so that throughout the literature, and even in the latest scholarly articles and standard reference works, we encounter many examples of what may safely be termed Merzbau legends.
Under the supervision of Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger, I have first focussed on drawing up a more accurate temporal and spatial chronology of the Merzbauten than has been attempted to date. In addition, I have examined many of the Merzbau legends to try and determine when and why they arose and what effect they have had on the reception history. My research has led me to the (unexpected) conclusion that the Merzbauten were essentially works created in the 1930s and 1940s, that is, during Schwitters’ period of ‘inner’ exile in the Germany of the 1930s and his years as an alien in Norway and Britain,. There are of course endless difficulties and pitfalls that arise from writing about art that no longer exists, and much must remain pure theory, but I have tried in my final chapters to formulate my own interpretation of Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbauten and other closely related structures on the basis of a careful review of all the sources available to me.
‘Der Merzbau und sein Publikum’, in Merzgebiete, Kurt Schwitters und seine Freunde, ed. Karin Orchard and Isabel Schulz, (Hannover 2006), 156-63
‘The Merzbau as Gesamtkunstwerk’, in Installative Event-Sculpture, Ch. II, (Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, 2005), 15-22
‘Schwitters, Arp und die Avant-Garde’ in Schwitters, Arp, ed. Hartwig Fischer, Hatje Canz, (Ostfildern 2004), 69-77
‘Dada Hanover’, in The Press Responds to Dada, Crisis and the Arts, The History of Dada, Vol. 9, ed. Harriet Watts, (Thompson Gale, New York 2004), 293-350
‘Kurt Schwitters and Katherine Dreier’ in German Life and Letters, 52:4, 1999, 443-56
Kurt Merz Schwitters, a Biographical Study, (University of Wales Press, Cardiff 1997)