Schwitters' early landscapes

THE KURT SCHWITTERS SOCIETY NEWSLETTER MAY 2021 page 1 GWENDOLEN WEBSTER: SOME NOTES ON KURT SCHWITTERS‘ EARLY LANDSCAPES Fig. 1 Kurt Schwitters, Mondschein (Volgers Altenteil), 1905. An Altenteil was where elderly family members were housed. Fig. 2 Kurt Schwitters, Misthaufen in Isernhagen, 1906 All works shown on this page are in private ownership. THE KURT SCHWITTERS SOCIETY NEWSLETTER MAY 2021 page 2 GWENDOLEN WEBSTER: SOME NOTES ON KURT SCHWITTERS‘ EARLY LANDSCAPES Fig. 3 Kurt Schwitters, Aus Isernhagen, 1906 Fig. 4 Kurt Schwitters, Alte Scheune aus Isernhagen, 1920 All works shown on this page are in private ownership. THE KURT SCHWITTERS SOCIETY NEWSLETTER MAY 2021 page 3 GWENDOLEN WEBSTER: SOME NOTES ON KURT SCHWITTERS’ EARLY LANDSCAPES The invention of Merz marked an end, not a beginning. This is the tenor of John Elderfield’s account of Schwitters’ artistic development in his 1985 monograph. ‘Schwitters’ breakthrough, however sudden it may appear at first sight, had been slowly prepared for,’ notes Elderfield. ‘He developed his own painting until it was all adjustment; the manipulation of a variable but finite number of pictorial elements.’1 In this brief article I will examine the primary phase of this development as evidenced by the landscapes Schwitters produced before 1908, that is, while he was still at school. His more numerous still lifes are customarily selected as a basis for a discussing the initial stages of his career, but the earliest examples of these competent if underwhelming works date from his student days, that is, between 1908 and 1914/5. As such, they were doubtless executed in accordance with the demands of Hannover Kunstgewerbeschule and the Dresden Academy; Elderfield dismisses them as ‘timid, cramped and utterly conventional’.2 The stolid, constrained nature of much of Schwitters’ student work indicates that his heart was not entirely in what he was doing. ‛I never enjoyed great success at art school...the curriculum never included what I wanted and needed to do,’ he confessed later.3 In the handful of landscapes that survive from his pre-student days, we can find some clues as to the direction he had chosen for himself before any theoretical restrictions were imposed on him from outside. In 1920, mulling over the years of his formal education, Schwitters expounded at length on the kind of academic techniques he had been taught at art school.4 These involved a practice, or rather discipline, that he refers to as abmalen — that is, visually reproducing a three-dimensional scene as accurately as possible on a two-dimensional surface. In the case of abmalen, he explains, the artist is irretrievably committed to the remainder of the picture the moment the first line has been drawn. In his youth, before the rigours of abmalen had been imposed upon him, he had evidently felt free to experiment, and if few of these works are extant, they bear examination in a way that the still lifes do not. His earliest known work, Am Rhein (Fig. 5), is an example of a method he quickly dumped. Never again in his oeuvre do we find this kind of dense landscape, here jam-packed with Rhenish romance and embellished with narrative connotations implicit in the gestures of the woman above and the man below. With its multiple planes and centre ground dipping Fig. 5 Am Rhein, 1902/4 steeply down to a village, it’s an ambitious composition for a schoolboy. Also disconcerting is its focus, in what might otherwise pass for a routine picture-postcard view; the plain blocks of the curved retaining wall dominate the foreground, almost in defiance of their setting, and are over-dimensional compared with the rest of the picture. (I have not been able to ascertain the location, and it may in part be imaginary.) THE KURT SCHWITTERS SOCIETY NEWSLETTER MAY 2021 page 4 SOME NOTES ON KURT SCHWITTERS’ EARLY LANDSCAPES (2) Of the multiplicity of elements in Am Rhein, few remain in (Krodotal bei) Harzburg (Fig. 6) apart from the roughly delineated vegetation and accentuated roof gables. This painting also survives in the form of a monochrome postcard sent by Schwitters in the 1920s, which begs the question of why he should attach so much significance to such an early work. Certainly from his point of view Harzburg marked a major step on the road to his later abstracts. In place of an all-singing, all-dancing, neatly composed prospect of the Rhine, we have a dour, semi-rural scene in which perspective plays little part and in which no horizon is visible. In contrast to the self-contained structure and deep pictorial space of Am Rhein, we are confronted with a pulsing arrangement of shapes and textures in which shadowing is rare and people lacking entirely. A half-timbered house marks the centre of the picture, but is not reproduced with any great exactitude. Around it is grouped a rhythmic pattern of roofs, some only partly in the picture; many stand out because of their deliberately darkened gable ends. This is not a landscape in a traditional sense, but more like a cut-out view, whose boundaries are seemingly arbitrary; the fenced lane running through the lower half, roughly parallel to the roof ridges, adds to the impression that we are looking at a section of a more extensive picture. The colour palette is limited, and everything bar the starkly blackened gabling is depicted with deliberate imprecision to the point of unrecognizability (as in the untidy hatching bottom right). We are left with variations on a theme whose primary motifs are angles, contrasting surfaces and textures. If the shapes of Harzburg were cut out of paper or other material, mounted on a base and treated to a loose wash of colour, the effect would not differ greatly from early Merz pictures such as Mz 214 of 1921 (Fig. 7), Merzbild 1B Bild mit rotem Kreuz, (1919) or Das Frühlingsbild (1920). Where Schwitters̕ abstracts move on from such early pictures as Harzburg is in his often-extolled criterion of rhythm; it’s not always easy to pin down what he means by this, but if — rendered in musical terms — the rhythm of Krodotal is Mozartian, then Mz 214 surely bears echoes of Stravinsky. Fig. 6 Aq. 52 Harzburg, 1905 THE KURT SCHWITTERS SOCIETY NEWSLETTER MAY 2021 SOME NOTES ON KURT SCHWITTERS’ EARLY LANDSCAPES (3) Fig. 7 Mz 214 For purposes of self-advertisement, Schwitters later had Harzburg made into a postcard. The first known example (now in Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques Doucet, Paris) was sent by Schwitters to Tristan Tzara on 8 November 1922. In the light of Adrian Sudhalter‘s not unfounded suspicion that Schwitters later touched up the word Merz to boost its visibility in reproductions of Das Merzbild 1919, it is not unlikely that he subsequently inked over the central gables of the original Krodotal painting to enhance their effect on a monochrome postcard.5 The nightscape entitled Mondschein. Volgers Altenteil (Fig. 1) is surely one of the series of moonlit water colours Schwitters mentioned in 1920 in connection with his decision to become an artist.6 As in Harzburg, the emphasis lies on the roofs, this time in sharp contrast to the sky. Details have been shunned and the centre foreground is no more than a blur; the faintly poignant effects of the windows (an Altenteil was where elderly family members were housed), the light on the gabling and the luminous sky vastly outweigh factors such as depth and perspective. In Aus Isernhagen (Fig. 9) we find the by now familiar motifs of halfFig. 8. Birke bei Burgwedel, 1907. timbering and gabled roofs, with a wash of muted colours extending over the whole lower half of the picture.7 Yet again Schwitters has bypassed the tenets of conventional landscape painting and has instead endeavoured to capture the effects of light on natural and man-made features. A further example, the sombre Birke bei Burgwedel (1907, Fig. 8) omits any buildings and concentrates on distinguishing the elements of the landscape by colour — in this case a variety of shades of green. THE KURT SCHWITTERS SOCIETY NEWSLETTER MAY 2021 SOME NOTES ON KURT SCHWITTERS’ EARLY LANDSCAPES (4) The most arresting of the early extant landscapes is surely Misthaufen bei Isernhagen (Fig. 2). With hindsight, it comes as no surprise that Schwitters should select a dung heap as a major object of interest, here irradiated with almost religious reverence against the backdrop of a prosaic wooden shed with a red-tiled roof. These commanding objects are lightly offset by an angular construction (a barrier or hoist?) and a hint of a track in the murky area to the right, all set against the complementary mauve of a pale sunset sky. While we can now identify some factors common to Schwitters’ earliest works — pitched roofs, suggestions of vegetation, triangular motifs, elusive lighting, nebulous swathes of subdued colour, with no more than a perfunctory nod to perspective — this picture introduces a new idea. What dominates the foreground is the gleaming straw of the dung heap, if minimally upstaged by a somewhat unsavoury brown patch. Poised somewhere between the built and the natural environment, the dung heap appears to generate a source of light in itself. It is tempting to assume that as a teenager, Schwitters studied works by contemporary German artists such as Max Liebermann, Adolf Hölzel and Lovis Corinth. Max Slevogt is another for whom the criteria of foreground/middle-ground/background play at most second fiddle to the effects of light; Slevogt’s dazzling landscapes lure us beyond the bounds of the picture frame, while his copious use of impasto brushstrokes removes any doubt that his works are in any sense studies in abmalen. It was this sort of spirit that attracted the young Schwitters, whereby the bold gestures manifest in Aus Isernhagen and Misthaufen bei Isernhagen rapidly atrophied during the course of his academic training. When he writes that in his early years, ‘I wasn't consistent either in copying nature or in composition,’ he presents these approaches as mutually exclusive alternatives.8 As he explained in the catalogue of his 1927 retrospective, ‘it is not possible to do both intensely at the same time, to copy and to paint’.9 Even in his earliest artworks, copying nature had not been an option; as a schoolboy he had paid barely a smidgen of attention to the particulars or perspectives of landscape, preferring to apply himself to the composition of planes and surfaces in combination with subtle colour effects. In the light of these early pictures, it seems that his instinct told him that this was the path he should take. After the academy had compelled him to change direction, his underlying dissatisfaction and frustration led him to make what amounted to a new start after he left; in a sense, though, he was just resuming a personal drive to abstraction that had gripped him ten years previously. © Gwendolen Webster, 2021 Notes: 1. John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, Thames and Hudson, London 1985, p. 14. 2. Ibid. 3 Kurt Schwitters, ‛Daten aus meinem Leben’ (1929), translated in Myself and My Aims, ed. Megan Luke, Chicago 2021, p. 340. 4. Kurt Schwitters, Merz (1920), translated in Luke 2021, p. 69-71. 5. Adrian Sudhalter, ‘Merz, Kommerz and the Merzwerbezentrale’, p. 23, in Kurt Schwitters : Avant-Garde and Advertising, exh, cat. Fundacion Juan March 2014, p. 21-33, reviewed in the KS Newsletter No. 17, Feb. 2015, p. 8-13. 6 ‘Kurt Schwitters‘, in Sturm Bilderbuch, Sturmverlag, Berlin 1920, unpaginated. Translated in Luke 2021, p. 66. 7. This picture is also signed ‘Curt Schwitters’. Curt was probably changed to Kurt after the Berlin spelling reform conference of 1901. Wilhelm II took a dim view of the new measures and demanded that all documents presented to him should conform to the old rules. 8. Ich war weder im Abmalen der Natur noch in der Komposition konsequent. Unpublished letter, MARCHIVUM Zug. 2/2012 Nr. 106: Vorbereitung und Durchführung der Ausstellung "Die Kindheit unserer Künstler", 1928-1933, p. 207. 9. Kurt Schwitters, Merz 20, (1927), translated in Luke 2021, p. 250. Illustrations: (Figs. 1-3 are privately owned and are included here courtesy of the Kurt Schwitters Archive, Sprengel Museum Hannover. I am indebted to Dr Isabel Schulz for her permissuon to reproduce these works, and also for her suppport and invaluable suggestions when I was writing this article.) Fig. 12 Am Rhein, 1902/1904, pencil on paper, 26.4 x 20.7 cm. Sprengel Museum Hannover, Leihgabe Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung, Hannover, seit 2004. Photo: Herling/Herling/Werner, Sprengel Museum Hannover. CR A001, que 06838198. Fig. 13 Aq. 52, Harzburg, 1905, watercolour, pencil, ink on card, 17.7 x 14.3. Photo: Herling, Sprengel Museum Hannover. CR 0001, Fig. 14 Mz 214, 1921, collage, 20 x 15.9 cm., Leihgabe Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung, Hannover. Photo: Herling/Herling/Werner, Sprengel Museum Hannover. CR 0818, obj 06830352. Fig. 15 Birke bei Burgwedel, 1907, watercolour on paper, 21 x 26.8 cm. Sprengel Museum Hannover, Leihgabe Land Niedersachsen. CR 0002. Inventarnummer: LN 489 THE KURT SCHWITTERS SOCIETY NEWSLETTER MAY 2021 RESEARCH NOTES/LOCATIONS: VOLGERS ALTENTEIL On p. 9 of our February 2021 Newsletter, we published two photos of Kurt Schwitters at a weir in the Lake District, taken by his son Ernst. The researches of our members Rosemary Park and Lizzie Fisher made it possible to identify the site as that of the old weir at Tarn Hows, still recognisable today despite alterations. Inspired by Rosemary and Lizzie, we undertook further investigations into Schwitters’ locations. This month, following on directly from the previous two articles, we will consider his moonlit scene of Volgers Altenteil, dating from 1905 (Fig. 1). Thanks to the intensive investigations of our member Walter Selke, we know that the building in this picture is still standing: it is located at Asphalweg 2 in Isernhagen, in the district known as the Kircher Bauernschaft. In Schwitters’ time the Altenteil belonged to Volgershof, a farm owned by Heinrich und Elise Volger, née Lüssenhop. (Walter Selke has ascertained that the former farmhouse also exists, if no longer owned by Volger family; it can be found on Google maps under Dorfstrasse 65, 30916 Isernhagen.) Both the farm and Altenteil, now listed buildings, were located a short distance north of the brickworks owned by the Schwitters and Dittmer families. The present-day aspect of the former Altenteil is shown below in the photo (Fig. 9) of 2017, taken from the south side. Fig. 9 The former Altenteil today © Gwendolen Webster, 2021 Walter Selke has pointed out that Schwitters must have portrayed the house from the north, not only on account of the position of the moon, but also on the evidence of the eaves foregrounded centre right (Fig. 1). The eaves belong to an older building that likewise still exists: the distinctive Hopfenspeicher, or hop store, dating from 1640 (Fig. 3: Volgershof in the background, right). Hops were once a common crop in Isernhagen, now commemorated by an annual Hop Festival (Fig. 4). Fig. 4