Kurt Schwitters - The Cathedral of Erotic Misery

 El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, 1924

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) was born in Hanover, Germany, to a well-to-do family. His parents were owners of a ladies' wear shop. From early childhood Schwitters suffered from epileptic seizures, later he said that these experiences led him to art. He attended the Kunstakademie in Dresden from 1909 to 1914 (alongside with Otto Dix and George Grosz). Schwitter's early paintings were mostly landscapes and academic portraits. In 1915 he married Helma Fischer, a teacher. Schwitters began to construct his first Merzbau in 1915, the transformation of six (or possibly more) rooms of the family house in Hannover, Waldhausenstrasse 5. This took place very gradually. Early photos show the Merzbau with a grotto-like surface and various columns and sculptures, possibly referring to similar pieces by Dadaists, including the Great Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama by Johannes Baader, shown at the First International Dada Fair, Berlin, 1920. Works by Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, amongst others, were incorporated into the installation.

 Kurt Schwitters, The Cathedral of Erotic Misery - Merzbau - Hanover - 1924

Using wood and plaster for the basic structure of the cubistic assemblage, which also included carboard, scraps of metal, old furniture, leftover objects found in garbage bins, and items from his friends, such as Mies van der Rohe's pencil and Sophie Täuber-Arp's brassière. "Everything an artist spits out is art," Schwitters said. The word "Merz" has a variety of associations, starting from "Kommerz" (commerce) to Schmerz (pain) and ausmerzen (to discard). With "Merz", Schwitters defined his own unique movement, "in close artistic friendship with Core dadaism," as he wrote. After the death of his son Gerd, he incorporated his death mask in the Merzbau. Schwitters christened the gigantic work, which eventually extended through several floors and room, The Column and then as his Cathedral of Erotic Misery. Only the gallery owner and critic Herwarth Walden, the architectural historian Sigfried Giedion, and Hans Arp were allowed to see the most secret caves of the Merzbau. His visitors Schwitters greeted with his own onomapoetic language - "the language of the birds" - while sitting on a tree branch. 

 Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, reconstruction by Peter Bissegger 1981–3 (Sprengel Museum Hanover)

Schwitters was to come into contact with Herwarth Walden after exhibiting expressionist paintings at the Hanover Secession in February 1918, which led directly to meetings with members of the Berlin Avant-garde, including Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and Hans Arp in the autumn of 1918. "I remember the night he introduced himself in the Café des Westens. 'I'm a painter', he said, 'and I nail my pictures together'", Raoul Hausmann later reported. Schwitter's poems and essays were published in Herwarth Walden's Der Sturm magazine. An Anna Blume (1919), Schwitters's first collection of verse, which appeared in the magazine, provoked a strong response. It parodied the high-flown language of love poetry, and was a critical and commercial success; it sold a 13.000 copies. 

 Cover of Anna Blume, Dichtungen, 1919

Hausmann Remembers

by Kurt Schwitters (c. 1920)

Then came Anna Bloom, and Kurt was famous.
"For all the wrong reasons, of course", he said,
but clearly, from his grin, he enjoyed it.
 

Anna Bloom is out of her tree!
    Anna Bloom is red.
    What colour is the tree?

That's how a schoolboy teases his sweetheart,
not satire at all; and in this age
(so we dadas proclaimed) art must be savage
- a frontal attack!

But Kurt held a mirror up to dada
- reversed its sneer
to a laughing face.
He called our southern tour "Anti-Dada"
and added an "h" to my Hanna(h)'s name
so he could read her backward.

Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 46 A. Das Kegelbild, 1921

In 1920 Schwitters met Hans Arp, who introduced him to the new collage method, and made a lecture tour with Raoul Hausmann in Chechoslovakia. In 1922 he attended the Dada meeting in Weimar. However, Schwitters never became a friend of George Grosz, who once drove him from his door, saying "I am not Grosz." Schwitters replied after ringing the bell again: "I am not Schwitters, either." Grosz was rebellious and politically committed, Schwitters described himself ambiguously as "Bürger und Idiot" (Bourgeois and Idiot). Schwitters founded the Merz magazine in 1923; the last issue was published in 1932. Merz consisted of books, catalogues, poems and paitings. Numbers 14-17 contained children's books written by Schwitters, Kate Steinitz and Theo van Doesburg. You can see scans of the magazine here. Schwitters also composed and performed an early example of sound poetry, Ursonate. The poem was influenced by Raoul Hausmann's poem "fmsbw" which Schwitters' heard recited by Hausmann in Prague in 1921. You can hear it here.

Kurt Schwitters, Construction for Noble Ladies, 1919

Most of the works attempt to make coherent aesthetic sense of the world around Schwitters, using fragments of found objects. These fragments often make witty allusions to current events. Merzbild 29a, Picture with Turning Wheel (1920, below), for instance, combines a series of wheels that only turn clockwise, alluding to the general drift Rightwards across Germany after the  failed Spartacist Uprising in January that year. Thanks to Schwitters' lifelong patron and friend Katherine Dreier, his work was exhibited regularly in the US from 1920 onwards. In the late 1920s he also became a well-known typographer. In 1928 Schwitters traveled in Norway, where he began to spend much of his time from 1931 onwards. In 1937, Schwitters was designated a "degenerate" artist by the Nazis and his works were shown in the Entartete Kunst exhibition. Schwitters left Germany for Norway, settling in Lysaker near Oslo. He never returned to the city of his birth. His wife Helma died of cancer in 1944 in Hanover.

Kurt Schwitters, Merzbild 29A, Picture with Turning Wheel, 1920 

When German troops invaded Norway, Schwitters fled in 1940 with his son for the United Kingdom on the ice breaker Fridtjof Nansen. Interned as an enemy alien by the British government he was held in interment camps for eighteen months. After being discharged from Hutchinson Square Camp at Douglas, Isle of Man, he settled in London. Schwitters had an exhibition in London in 1944 and in 1947 in New York and Basel, but his work did not attract significant popular or critical interest. Schwitters's Hanover Merzbau was completely destructed by Allied bombing raids on the night of October 8, 1943.

Kurt Schwitters painting in Norway, 1936

In 1944 a stroke left Schwitters temporally paralyzed on one side of his body. The next year he moved with Edith Thomas to Ambleside, in the Lake District. There he became a well known figure, although he did not talk about his past. His portraits of local residents were displayed in shops. With the financial aid from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Schwitters began to build in 1947 his third Merzbau (or the Merzbarn) into a stone barn At Elterwater. He never finished it. Schwitters died in solitude on January 8, 1948, in Kendal. Many artists have cited Schwitters as a major influence, including Ed Ruscha and Robert Rauschenberg, who said after seeing an exhibition of Schwitters' work in 1959, that "I felt like he made it all just for me." You can read more about Kurt Schwitter's here.

Raoul Hausmann - Painting with a Gun in my Hand

  Conrad Felixmüller, Portrait of Raoul Hausmann, c.1920

Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971) was born in Vienna to Gabriele Hausmann, née Petke, and the Hungarian portrait and history painter Victor Hausmann. In 1900, Raoul moved with his family to Berlin. He left school at the age of fourteen and began artistic studies with his father instead. "My childhood was rather happy, because my parents didn't care about my private life. My father was very liberal. My mother was a beautiful lady, very distant and alien", Hausmann remembered shortly before his death. His parents committed suicide in 1920.

 Raoul Hausmann, Psychogramm, 1917

In 1905, Hausmann met the violinist Elfriede Schaeffer, whom he married after the birth of their daughter Vera in 1907. Between 1908 and 1911, Hausmann enrolled at Arthur Lew-Funcke's art school, one of the many private art schools in Berlin, where he studied anatomy and nude drawing. He worked on his first typographical designs as well as glass window designs, and assisted his father with the restoration of murals in the Hamburg city hall in 1914. One year later, Hausmann began an extramarital affair with the artist Hannah Höch, forming an artistically productive yet turbulent relationship that would last until 1922.

 Raoul Hausmann, Portrait of Hannah Höch, 1916

Hausmann's encounters with expressionist painting in 1912 (which he saw in Herwarth Walden's avant-garde Sturm Gallery), proved pivotal for his artistic development. He produced his first expressionist lithographs and woodcuts in Erich Heckel's atelier and published his first polemical texts against the art establishment in Walden's magazine, also named Der Sturm. Hausmann remained active in expressionist circles well into 1917, publishing two essays in Franz Pfemfert's Die Aktion, a journal known for its leftist, antimilitaristic stance. As an Austrian-born citizen living in Germany, Hausmann was not drafted into military service and thus was spared the shattering war experiences that affected the work of so many artists. Yet his initial attitude toward the war was characteristic of the expressionist generation in that he believed the devastation on the battlefields held promise of a vital future, destroying calcified Wilhelminian social structures and clearing the way for a new world. 

 Raoul Hausmann, Self-Portrait, c. 1920

In 1916, Hausmann met the two men whose radicalism nourished this idea of a new beginning, namely the psychoanalyst Otto Gross, an anarchist and early disciple of Siegmund Freud, who considered psychoanalysis to be preparatory work for a revolution. He also befriended the radical writer Franz Jung, who was a disciple of Gross (and avid reader of Walt Whitman). Inspired by the work of Gross and Jung, as well as the writings of Whitman and Friedrich Nietzsche, Hausmann understood himself to be a pioneer for the birth of the new man. The notion of destruction as an act of creation was the point of departure for Hausmann's Dadasophy, his theoretical contribution to Berlin Dada.

 

Raoul Hausmann's Postcard to I.K. Bonset, 1921

Hausmann was one of a group of young radicals that began to form the nucleus of Berlin Dada in 1917. Richard Hülsenbeck ("To make literature with a gun in my hand had for a time been my dream") delivered his First Dada Speech in Germany, January 22, 1918 at the fashionable Neumann gallery on Kurfürstendamm. Over the course of the next few weeks, Hausmann, Hülsenbeck, George Grosz, John Heartfield, Franz Jung, Hannah Höch, Walter Mehring and Johannes Baader started the Club Dada. The first event staged was an evening of poetry performances and lectures against a retrospective of paintings by the "established" artist Lovis Corinth at the Berlin Sezession, April 12th, 1918: Hülsenbeck recited the Dada Manifesto, Grosz danced a Sincopation Jazz, whilst Hausmann ended the evening by shouting his manifesto The New Material in Painting at the by-now near riotous audience. The Berliner Börsen-Courier, a conservative newspaper reported:  

"The threat of violence hung in the air. One envisioned Corinth's pictures torn to shreds with chair legs. But in the end it didn't come to that. As Raoul Hausmann shouted his programmatic plans for dadaist painting into the noise of the crowd, the manager of the sezession gallery turned the lights out on him."

 Cover of Der Dada, Vol. 1, including a poem, Dadadegie, by Johannes Baader and Raoul Hausmann, 1919

As Dadasoph, and cofounder of Club Dada in Berlin, Hausmann wrote several key Dada texts, including the "Dadaist Manifesto" with Richard Huelsenbeck and the sixteen-page Club Dada brochure with Jung and Huelsenbeck. He also edited the journal Der Dada (above). The periodical contained drawings, polemics, poems and satires, all typeset in a multiplicity of opposing fonts and signs. From 1919 onward, Hausmann prepared the big world atlas Dadaco, though the project fell through due to editorial difficulties. In addition, Hausmann played a central role in organizing Dada events, including the First International Dada Fair with John Heartfield and George Grosz and numerous Dada matinees and soirées in Berlin, often in collaboration with Johannes Baader.

 Raoul Hausmann, Dada wins!, 1920

At the beginning of 1920, Baader (Chief-Dada), Hausmann (Dadasopher) and Huelsenbeck (World-Dada) embarked on a six week tour of Eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia, drawing large crowds of up to 2000 people and bemused reviews. The programme included primitivist verse, simultaneous poetry recitals by Baader and Hausmann, and Hausmann's Dada-Trot (Sixty-One Step) described as "a truly splendid send-up of the most modern exotic-erotic social dances that have befallen us like a plague." Hausmann's artistic contributions to Dada were purposefully eclectic, consistently blurring the boundaries between visual art, poetry, music, and dance. His "optophonetic" poems of early 1918 fused lyrical texts with expressive typography, insisting on the role of language as both visual and acoustic. Boisterous public performances of these poems not only underscored their vocal dimension but also transformed their two-dimensionality into a bodily experience. You can here some of his acoustic poems on UbuWeb; a few are even on sale at iTunes.

 August Sander, Raoul Hausmann, 1920s

From 1918, Hausmann incorporated collage elements into his work, influenced by war photomontages from the front that he saw while on vacation with Hannah Höch. He also manufactured several reliefs and assemblages. The most famous work, Der Geist Unserer Zeit - Mechanischer Kopf (The Spirit of Our Age -  Mechanical Head) was constructed from a hairdresser's wig-making dummy. The piece has various measuring devices attached including a ruler, pocket watch mechanism, typewriter, camera segments and a crocodile wallet:

Raoul Hausmann, The Spirit of Our Age - Mechanical Head, 1920

In September 1921, Hausmann, Höch, Kurt Schwitters and his wife Helma undertook an "anti-dada" tour to Prague. As well as his recitals of sound poems, he also presented a manifesto describing a machine "capable of converting audio and visual signals interchangeably, that he later called the Optophone" (after many years of experimentation, this device was patented in London in 1935). By the late 1920s, Hausmann had re-invented himself as a fashionable society photographer, and lived in a ménage à trois with his second wife, painter Hedwig Mankiewitz, and his new love Vera Broido in the fashionable district of Charlottenburg. 

 Raoul Hausmann, Two Nudes on a Beach [Hedwig Mankiewitz and Vera Broido], 1930

Vera Broido was born in St Petersburg in 1907, the daughter of two Russian Jewish revolutionaries. In 1914, when Vera was seven, her family was plunged into a life of isolation and fear when her mother, Eva Broido, was sentenced to exile in Western Siberia for taking a stand against the war. Vera fled Siberia for Paris (where she studied under Alexandra Exter), and then moved on to Berlin. She never saw her mother Eva again and was later told that she had been executed.

 Raoul Hausmann, Study of Expression [Vera Broido], 1931

After his engagement with Dada, Hausmann now focused primarily on photography, producing portraits, nudes, and landscapes. After the Nazis had seized power in January of 1933, Hausmann,  his wife and Vera Broido emigrated to Ibiza. The photographs he produced focused on ethnographic and architectural motifs of premodern life in Ibiza. After the outbreak of the the Spanish Civil War in 1936, and the bombardment and subsequent occupation of Ibiza by Franco's troops, Hausmann (who had been active in Spanish anti-fascist groups) had to leave Ibiza. After an adventureous voyage he shortly settled in Prague, but was forced to flee again in 1938 after the German invasion of Czechoslovakia. He then moved to Peyrat-le-Château, near Limoges where he lived illegally with his Jewish wife Hedwig, hiding for years in a small and humid rooftop chamber. After the Normandy landings in 1944, the pair finally moved to Limoges, where Hausmann lived in a secluded manner for the rest of his life.

The First International Dada Fair at Dr. Otto Burchard’s Berlin art gallery in 1920. From left to right: Hausmann, Höch, Dr. Burchard, Baader, Herzfelde, Margarete Herzfelde, Schmallhausen, Grosz (with hat and cane), Heartfield.

In the 1950s there was a revival of interest in Dada, especially in the United States. As interest grew, Hausmann began corresponding with a number of leading American artists, discussing Dada and it's contemporary relevance. He refuted the term Neo-Dada, then in vogue, which had been applied to a number of artists including Yves Klein, Robert Rauschenberg, and George Maciunas, to whom he wrote in 1962:  

"I think even the Americans should not use the term "neodadaism" because "neo" means nothing and "ism" is old-fashioned. Why not simply "Fluxus"? It seems to me much better, because it's new, and dada is historic. I was in correspondence with Tzara, Hülsenbeck and Hans Richter concerning this question, and they all declare neodadaism does not exist. So long." 

 Adrian Ghenie, Dada is Dead, 2009

Raoul Hausmann died in Limoges on February 1, 1971. So long.

Johannes Baader - Oberdada

Raoul Hausmann (left) and Dada Chief Johannes Baader, c. 1920

Johannes Baader (1875-1955) was born in Stuttgart. Between 1892 and 1895, he was apprenticed in masonry while he studied architecture at Stuttgart's Staatliche Baugewerbeschule. In 1903 he became an architect in the Vereinigung bildender Künstler für monumentalen Grabmalsbau in Dresden (Artists Association for Construction of Monumental Graves). In 1905 Baader moved to Berlin, where he met Raoul Hausmann. Declared unfit for military service in World War I, he dedicated his energies to what he called "spiritual architecture", utopian designs of monumental, metaphysical, and messianic dimensions, and contributed to the journals Das Blaubuch, Die freie Straße, and Der Dada in 1917.

Johannes Baader, Dadaists against Weimar, 1919

As self-proclaimed Oberdada (Dada Chief) Baader's Dada tactics were mainly in the form of spectacular manifestos and public performances, often in collaboration with Raoul Hausmann. In 1917 in the midst of the First World War, he was certified legally insane as a result of manic depression. Now equipped with considerably license, he gave outrageous public performances parodying public and mythic identities and producing utopian designs of monumental, metaphysical, and messianic dimensions. In the same year he ran for office in the Reichstag (National Assembly) in Saarbrücken and  - together with Raoul Hausmann - founded a company called Christus GmbH (Jesus Christ Ltd.) to protect war deserters, thus associating conscientious objection with Christian Martyrdom. Similarly, on 17 November 1918, Baader staged a performance in the Berlin cathedral called Christus ist euch Wurst (You don't give a hang for Christ). This action provoked a public scandal, and Baader was arrested for blasphemy. Hausmann, in turn, wrote a letter to Berlin's Minister of Culture arguing for Baader's right to free speech. 

 

 

 Kurt Lohse, Portrait of "Oberdada" Johannes Baader, 1929 

In March 1919 Baader and Hausmann announced the Dadaist Republik Nikolassee to start on 1 April 1919 under the auspices of the Central Committee of the Dada Movement. On 12 March 1919 Baader and Hausmann staged a "Propaganda Evening" in Café Austria, where they founded the Antinationaler Rat der unbezahlten Arbeiter (ARUDA - Anti-National Council of Unpaid Workers) and Club der Blauen Milchstraße. Baader announced the death and the resurrection of the Oberdada on April 1 (starting year 1 in a new era), and as such, participated in the Erste Berliner Dada-Ausstellung.

Johannes Baader, Germany's Greatness and Decadence, First Dada-Exhibition, Berlin 1920

Baader was a participant in the discourse of postwar Weimar Germany in a dadaist fashion, putting out his Buch des Weltfriedens (Book of World Peace), a reaction to the Treaty of Versailles, on 28 June 1919, which became known as Handbuch des Oberdada (HADO). Similarly, on 16 July, Baader threw flyers into the meeting of the Weimar National Assembly printed with the slogan "Dadaists against Weimar" and three days later proclaimed the socialist politician Philip Scheidemann as "Ehrendada" (Dada of Honour) in a streetcar. On 11 November, exactly a year after the Kaiser abdicated, Baader printed a calling card that announced him to be president of the Earth and Universe.

 Johannes Baader (Editor), Die freie Straße (November 1918 issue) - Against Property!

Conrad Felixmüller

 Conrad Felixmüller, Soldier in the Madhouse, 1918

Conrad Felixmüller (1897-1977) was born in Dresden as son of a factory worker. After attending drawing classes at the Dresden Kunstgewerbeschule for one year, (where he  became a close friend of Peter August Böckstiegel) Felixmüller first attended the private school of the artist Ferdinand Dorsch in 1912 and the same year he entered Professor Carl Bantzer's class at the Königliche Kunstakademie in Dresden, to start training as a painter.  In 1915 Felixmüller left the academy and studio of. He now worked as a freelance artist in Dresden, but often went to Berlin, where he painted in Ludwig Meidner's studio:

 Ludwig Meidner, Bildnis Konrad Felixmüller, 1915

 Felixmüller also contributed to the journal Der Sturm (The Storm), published by Herwarth Walden. In 1917 Felixmüller founded the art and literature journal MENSCHEN (Men) together with the book dealer Felix Stiemer, with Felixmüller being responsible for the graphic design like he was in Der Sturm. At the same time he had exhibitons at Hans Goltz's in Munich and at the Dresden Galerie Arnold together with Heckel, Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff. 

 Conrad Felixmüller, Workers Returning Home, 1920s

In 1918 Felixmüller moved to Dresden, where he became the founder and chairman of the Dresdner Sezession and joined the November-Gruppe as well as the revolutionary Genossenschaft für proletarische Kunst (Cooperative for Proletarian Art). At the same time Felixmüller worked for various newspapers (e.g. Die Sichel in Regensburg and Rote Erde in Hamburg) and published several literary texts such as his autobiography Mein Werden (Kunstblatt) or his thoughts on Künstlerische Gestaltung. Felixmüller's early creative work was strongly influenced by Expressionism, which he interpreted in a socio-critical way and soon transformed into his own form of expressive Realism. He was also a member of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) since 1919. 

 Conrad Felixmüller, The Agitator, 1920

In 1933, 40 of  Felixmüller's paintings were shown at the Dresden exhibition of  Degenerate Art. In 1934 he moved to Berlin-Charlottenburg, hoping to be able to work more freely there. (see my related blog). In 1937, 151 of his works were confiscated from public collections. In 1941 his Berlin home was destroyed by bombs, and Felixmüller sought refuge in Damsdorf in the Mark. 

Conrad Felixmüller, Portrait of Raoul Hausmann, 1920s

In 1944 Felixmüller moved to Tautenhain. That same year he was called-up for military service. After a short time in Sovjet captivity, Felixmüller returned to Tautenhain in 1945. In 1949 he was appointed professor at the Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle, where he taught drawing and painting at the faculty of education. After his retirement in 1961 Felixmüller returned to Berlin. Before his death in 1977 numerous exhibitions took place in East and West Germany, Paris, Rome, Bologna and Florence.

Conrad Felixmüller, Self-Portrait, 1920 

You can see more works of Conrad Felixmüller here in my Flickr set.