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© Sprengel Museum Hannover, Kurt Schwitters Archive / DACS 2013
THE MAGAZINE THE IMAGINARY INTERVIEW
Kurt Schwitters
(1887-1948),
performing the
Ursonate 1944.
Face to face with Kurt Schwitters
Autumn 1947, Little Langdale. A young man of 60
with dishevelled hair greets us in his English
country house.
La Gazette Drouot: So here he is, the man of
thwarted destiny!
Kurt Schwitters: (Laughing) My young friend, just
like the whole of Europe - I deserve no credit! And
yet, everything began well for me, with a spell at
the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1909. I was
painting in a Post-Impressionist, naturalistic style.
But actually I only really became alive to art
because of the war! What would we have done -
what would we have become if history had taken
a different course? Oh, I don't consider that bloodbath
as anything other than what it was. But we
have to face the facts: without the horrors of the
trenches, there would have been no Expressionism,
no Surrealism, no Otto Dix, no Kurt Schwitters.
We are wisps of straw in the vast field of
humanity. And until 1914, you could say that we
were still in the 19th century.
And so you moved towards Expressionism
after the war.
Yes. But you know, I had always been a mystic;
that's my Holbein side! I'm German, after all. And
the Dada influence was nothing more than that,
with absurdity on top. In Berlin I met Hans Arp
and Raoul Hausmann, whose vision of the world
really appealed to me. And that was when
I began producing my collages, the Merzbilder.
I picked up a whole pile of things in the street, in
dustbins, in public gardens...In my mind, these