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Alien
at Ambleside
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Dr G A Johnston ] [
Merz Lives
On ] [
Kurt Schwitters at the Armitt ] [
KS - An Appreciation by Russell Mills ]
[ Newspaper Collages ] [
Wood on Wood ]
Kurt
Schwitters is now recognised as a 20th-century master, best known for his
abstract art of Merz, developed in Germany between the wars.
But he spent his last years in the Lake District, a poor, sick, virtually
unknown refugee.
‘We
keep right on playing until death comes for us,” Schwitters once said. “I
have so little time.”
Report
by William Feaver
for The Sunday Times Magazine
(August 18 1974)
| As a rule the annual
Lakeland Artists’ Exhibition at Grasmere is hardly surprising.
However, in the summer of 1947 the peace of the prevailing landscapes was
disturbed by two collages, strange objects made from litter, scraps, debris:
absolute rubbish. One had half a
ball stuck to it. Both were
initialled KS. They failed to sell.
KS, a German refugee who had arrived in the Lake District a couple of
years before, might have had better luck with the plashy views he was in the
habit of laying out for sale on the steps of the Bridge House, Ambleside’s
most picturesque spot. Or there
were his portraits of local personalities, Dr Johnson for instance, Harry
Bickerstaff the schoolteacher and Frank O’Neill of the Central Cafe.
These had been much admired when he put them on show in key positions
such as Mrs Rushforth’s sweet-cum-pottery shop window. KS stood for Kurt
Schwitters. His gravestone in
Ambleside Church yard reads “Kurt Schwitters 1887-1948.
Creator of Merz”. Which
still doesn’t mean much to Ambleside people, though they have become quite
used to questions from visitors - art students particularly - who come like
pilgrims to his burial place. They
used to see him ambling around in a perpetual overcoat and beret, suitcase in
hand; a distant figure, tall, stooping, flat-footed.
His companion, a pretty English girl, half his age, tended to attract
more attention. He called her
Wantee and in return she nicknamed him Jumbo which, everyone agrees, suited him
perfectly. |
KS by El Lissitsky c1924
© DACS 2003
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Schwitters didn’t
seem all that unusual. During the war, evacuees - notably students from the
Royal College of Art - were billeted in every available boarding house, barn and
outbuilding. Compared to them he
looked just a shabby old oddity. Hilde
Goldschmidt, another refugee artist who lived a few miles away in Langdale, was
one of the few to recognise immediately who and what Schwitters really was:
“One day I saw a drawing in a little antique shop in Ambleside.
It was a portrait in pen and ink, signed Schwitters.
I must have uttered my doubts aloud as to whether it was the Schwitters. Suddenly the owner, a dear old lady, stood behind me and
said, ‘It is the one’ and fetched a catalogue from his exhibition in the
London Gallery, with an introduction by Herbert Read.
And she said, ‘I can also give you his address - he lives in
Ambleside.’ It wasn’t that
Schwitters faced any particular hostility in Ambleside on account of his being
German and an abstract artist. As
Wantee says, “We were quite unaware of the feelings and opinions of local
people anyway, though I don’t think we really were accepted.”
But he had come to expect rejection, not say persecution.
His paintings had been thrown out of German museums and paraded
derisively in Hitler’s Entartete Kunst - Degenerate Art - exhibition.
His publications had been burnt. He
had been forbidden to give his recitals or seek employment and had only been
able to transfer work from Germany to Norway before the war because customs
officials took one look and declared it worthless.
He had arrived in Ambleside a totally displaced person. |
| Between the wars
Schwitters had been identified with successive phases of the European
avant-garde, Der Sturm in Berlin, de Stijl in Holland and Dada here and there.
He had chanced on a word ‘Merz’ which became his trademark and
callsign. To him it meant a
positive, affirmative Phoenix spirit, expressed by any means he cared to choose:
writing, recitation, painting, sculpture, collage.
Merz was the title of the magazine he published from 1923-32 and
‘Merzbau’ the name of an extraordinary sculptural environment he spent 10
years constructing in his home in Hanover only to leave unfinished when life
there became impossible. Unlike the hardcore
Dadaists of his generation who proclaimed something of an end to art, and
delighted in playing among its ruins, Schwitters believed that the most
derelict, unpromising materials could be salvaged, reorganised and shown to be
beautiful given an artist’s Midas touch. |
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Schwitters had been
comfortably placed in Hanover, so much so that Berlin Dadaists had objected to
his bourgeois life style. Assured
of a basic income from four houses he inherited, he had also worked as a graphic
consultant to the municipality and had founded his own advertising studio - the
MerzWerbezentrale. However, the New
Order of Merz was deemed undesirable by the Third Reich.
The pressures grew so intense that he took refuge in Norway with his son
Ernst in January 1937, leaving his wife Helma to look after their parents and
property. Living at Lysaker, near
Oslo, he became deeply depressed and at one point attempted suicide.
Ernst encouraged him to build a second, substitute Merzbau and he began
to establish himself as a landscape and portrait painter.
But three years later he had to escape again and landed in Scotland in
June 1940 with his son and daughter-in-law, two white mice and a small birchwood
sculpture whittled into shape en route. |
| As an enemy alien he
was shifted from one reception centre to another - Edinburgh, York and
Manchester - before being interned on the Isle of Man.
The camp was a collection of seaside boarding houses and he found his
stay fairly agreeable. Moreover,
the commandant allowed him to work in a room outside the camp and even to strip
lino off the floors to paint on. His
fellow internees, many of them artists and academics, were treated to Merz
recitals, but they made little response. Towards the end of 1941
Schwitters was declared safe and turned loose, with bundles of completed work.
He joined Ernst in London and met Edith Thomas -Wantee- who described
herself as a “very, very ordinary London girl, who worked as a telephonist and
lodged in the same house in St Stephens Crescent, Bayswater.
Once more he tried to scrape a living from portrait commissions and at
the same time pursue his Merz interests. He
had a one-man show at Jack Bilbo’s Modern Art Gallery in 1944.
Herbert Read provided a catalogue introduction.
“Schwitters,” he noted, “is one of the most genuine artists in the
modern movement…the supreme master of collage . . . a poet parallel to James
Joyce.” But few came and only one
collage was sold, for seven guineas. “During
my exhibition,” he wrote, “I received a telegram notifying me that Helma had
died; she suffered from cancer as I later heard.
That was my best friend for all time gone, leaving me and Ernst. I also learned that my house and Merzbau in Hanover had been
destroyed. There were only a few
pictures left in Basle and what I had taken over to Lysaker.”
While in this hopeless, derelict state he had a stroke which left him
paralysed down one side for a while. |
© Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung
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At the end of the war
Ernst returned to Norway and Wantee, having been demobbed, then felt she had to
leave London for a short holiday in the Lakes.
“She had a kind of nervous breakdown after the bombing and I was not
very healthy either,” Schwitters said. He
decided to go with her and raised enough money to last them a fortnight by
selling his stamp collection. They arrived in
Windermere on June 26, 1945. The
following day they took a bus to Ambleside where they had booked rooms at No. 2,
The Gale, one of three houses stuck on a shelf on the hillside. Schwitters was worried about the landlady, Miss
Bowsefield’s likely reaction faced with this oddly-matched couple.
Though she raised no
immediate objections, life with her did prove irksome.
She kept strict house rules. Mirrors
were fixed around the house so that she could keep an eye on her lodgers and
make sure they used only one burner on the gas stove, turned down low.
However, they had four rooms to themselves and a piano on which
Schwitters played Beethoven, Greig and his own Merz music.
He also used a little outhouse at the back and started accumulating
likely materials for his work. The
fortnight’s holiday stretched to well over a month.
‘We were out on Wansfell one day when we heard it was VJ Day,” Wantee
remembers. “There were bonfires
all around, and there was the joy of knowing that at last everything was O.K.” |
| This would have been an
obvious time for them to leave. At
one stage Schwitters thought of going back to Norway; America was another
possibility. But he was unwilling
to move so they drifted into staying for good.
“I don’t think he wanted to do anything else but stay in the Lake
District and paint,” Wantee says. “We lived very much
apart from the local community. The friends and acquaintances we made could be
counted on one hand.” The first
and foremost of these was Harry Bickerstaff, a slight, quiet man, a teacher at
Ambleside elementary school, who had an allotment on the Gale. He couldn’t make him out at first, for Schwitters said
nothing about his past, and he didn’t like to pry. |
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“Miss Bowsefield told
me he was a Norwegian artist. I
think she was a little bit scared actually - and she wasn’t the only one.
A portrait painter - a professor from the Royal College of Art - was
lodging there too, with his wife. Now
he couldn’t bring up the courage to approach Schwitters.
He asked me about him, and said how proud he was of being in the same
house. I said, quite simply,
‘He’s a very normal gentleman, and I’ll introduce you if you like.’ And he says, ‘Oh, no! You mustn’t do that!”
Not knowing this, Schwitters and Wantee thought they were stand-offish.
They found it easier to
make friends with people met casually in a pub where they went occasionally to
play skittles. Schwitters picked on
them the same way as he gathered his collage materials.
There was Mr Routledge, a retired woodcutter who used to sit sunning
himself by his cottage door at the foot of the Gale.
Schwitters started on a portrait of his wife, but she couldn’t stay put
long enough so he gave up and did Routledge instead in 12 sittings.
Pleased with the result, Schwitters went to see Routledge’s daughter,
Clara Thornborrow. “He asked if
I’d like to buy this picture. ‘Someone in the family should have it,’ he
said. The price was so little -
about five pounds - but my husband bad just come out of the army and we were
poor. We had enough to give to
him.” |
| Having decided to stay
on in Ambleside, Schwitters once again aimed to make a living doing likable
portraiture and landscapes. During
his walks he would sometimes stop at a farmhouse and ask if they would like him
to do them a painting. He made
repeated studies of the Ambleside Bridge House perched curiously across a
stream. Paintings like these could
be classified mere potboilers. But
Schwitters refused to make any absolute distinction between works to be sold as
quickly as possible and those he believed would endure.
“You have to paint a portrait, an apple or a flower before you can go
on,” he used to say. “I can
never give up or entirely forget a period of time during which I worked with
great energy. I am still an Impressionist even while I am Merz. I am not ashamed of being able to do good portraits.” |
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© Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung |
He worked in an
expresso-impressionistic style; or, as Hilde Goldschmidt puts it, “the good
traditional manner he had learned at the Dresden Academy.
And he charged, as he remarked in his dry humour, according to the amount
of body depicted. Five guineas for a head, 10 guineas to the breast and should
the hands come in it rose to 15 guineas.”
He prospected in every likely quarter to find sitters who would pay him
in cash or kind. Robertson, the
dentist in Windermere, had a free portrait by way of payment for taking
Schwitters’ teeth out and supplying a new set.
He received advice on sales appeal: “Wantee tells me how to behave to
get portrait commissions from the English middle class.”
But there were constant frustrations. “In England,” he observed,
“you must not see any brushstrokes on the surface of the picture.
My pictures have brushstrokes, therefore I have difficulties.” |
| That first summer in
Ambleside they evolved an easygoing routine.
Schwitters would work from 8.30 until one o’clock with a break for
coffee. “Then if the weather was
nice we just packed a picnic lunch and went out into the mountains.”
They would go out to Jenkyn’s Crag behind the Gale, to Tarn Hows or
Grasmere, Wantee carrying the food in a haversack, Schwitters equipped with a
stick and the suitcase which held his paints, brushes, boards or old canvas.
He browsed along the shoreline of Lake Windermere looking for driftwood
and litter, clambered round the riverbeds in search of lumps and slithers of
Greenstone slate ripe for development into sculpture.
Nothing went disregarded. He
evolved little rituals: he would pick snails off the path for their safety’s
sake, swish his stick in the waters of Tarn Hows, hum contentedly as he
collected ox-eye daisies. But just
as each picnic was a foraging expedition, every journey was an errand.
For the main object of
the expeditions was to paint. Schwitters
smacked down impressions of mountainsides dribbling with midsummer foliage,
tumbledown streams, walled meadows. Some these pictures turned out merely local colour, but others
have an exhilarated, rush-released air walled meadows. Some of these pictures
turned out merely local colour, but others have an exhilarated, rush-released
air. ‘The scenery, nature itself;
meant much more to him than the people,” Wantee says. In the evening
Schwitters would return to the Gale, like a hunter coming back from the kill,
the suitcase full and a wet painting strapped to his back. He became more
energetic and enthusiastic than he had been for years. |
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Towards the end of 1945
he spent 10 days in Blackpool on a portrait job arranged for him by Mr Varty,
the Ambleside bookseller. He had to
get up at dawn to catch the bus, and Wantee went to the end of the Gale with him
to see him off. “The whole place
had piled high with snow during the night and the path down had become a sheet
of ice. It looked impossible, but
Schwitters threw down his case of brushes and paints and I watched them zig zag
down the hill out of sight. Then he
looked back at me, sat down and followed, waving goodbye as he went round the
corner. I thought, ‘My God,
he’ll break every bone!’ But he
survived. You see if he made an
arrangement with someone he stuck to it.” Not long after he had
another stroke and was in bed for five weeks.
Harry Bickerstaff wrote in his diary on Saturday February 9: “Wantee
came to see me at the garden to say Schwitters was very ill and Dr Johnson
warned her he could die. She was
afraid and knew nobody but me and asked me to go and see him.” |
| He visited him daily.
‘When Schwitters began to recover he asked me a lot of questions about the
subjects I was teaching; then he taught me to play chess and painted my
portrait. He would take a thick
brush and put an outline in any colour. He
was on top of it all the while he was painting and when you looked very closely
you couldn’t see what those large pieces of paint formed”. “March 20.
Schwitters well enough to come here with me to show the portrait to my
wife. During this time Wantee and I
were looking for new accommodation for Schwitters as the stiff climb onto the
Gale had become impossible for him. I
found rooms for them with a near neighbour of mine, Mr Creighton, the local
blacksmith.” Millans Park is a trim
street with conspicuously clean doorsteps and a weakness for half-timbering.
They moved into No. 4 at 30 shillings a week.
Charlie Creighton’s wife had died not long before.
“He was a lonely little man,” Wantee
says. “His house was empty and we
brought life to it.” And a good
deal besides. They had arrived in
Ambleside with only a couple of suitcases, but things had accumulated.
“The problem was how to get it all down the hill.
In the end we went to Mr Routledge, the woodcutter, and he said he’d
move it for us. We brought it down
by horse and cart - and literally it was a cartful of rubbish.
I’ve never worked so hard in all my life, hiding it.
A couple of days later Mr Creighton came to me and said: ‘You’ve
brought rather a lot of stuff haven’t you?
I thought to myself: ‘You ought to see what’s under the bed, dearie!” |
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Schwitters’ pictures
also caused friction: “There was a large tool chest in the attic.
Schwitters had lots of collages lying on the floor to dry out and Mr
Creighton, of course, didn’t realise these were works of art.
And so, when he went to his tool chest he stamped all over these little
bits of rubbish thinking, probably, what untidy people we were.
Jumbo came down and said: ‘Wantee, you’ll have to go and tell him not
to stand on my pictures.’ So I
said: ‘I wonder, if you mind, if you must go to the studio, would you just let
me go with you to pick up the pictures.’
There was a pause. ‘Pictures?
he said, ‘Pictures?’ ‘Yes,
these are works of art Mr Creighton.’ And
he just said, ‘Well I knew he was mad, but I didn’t think you were too!’ |
| Before long Mr
Creighton’s house was riddled with Merz.
Schwitters boiled up his flour-and-water paste in the kitchen, and spent
hours sorting his finds, filing them away in boxes.
They could no longer be concealed. Collages would lie around for months
awaiting the last adjustments and the final pasting.
They can be dated roughly by postmarks and other inlaid clues.
Addresses written in different hands, the blue-and-white stripes off
airmail envelopes, letters from New York, France and Switzerland, demonstrate
his growing contacts with the outside world during 1946.
Ernst sent him magazines in which his photographs had appeared.
Bits of these went into the collages.
Kate Steinitz, a friend from the Hamburg days living in Los Angeles, once
sent him a food parcel wrapped in the comic strip section from a Sunday paper.
He was intrigued and asked to see more. He
also particularly liked the red bits off Picture Post covers.
The materials shaped his work, which in its turn, reflected the Lake
District. |
© Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Stiftung |
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The story continues at this link:
Alien
at Ambleside Part 2
[
Alien at Ambleside ] [
Dr G A Johnston ] [
Merz Lives
On ] [
Kurt Schwitters at the Armitt ] [
KS - An Appreciation by Russell Mills ]
[ Newspaper Collages ] [
Wood on Wood ]
|