The show at the Berkeley Art Museum is the first time that Schwitters' work has been displayed on the West Coast and a rare chance to view a portion of his multidisciplinary output. While largely unknown to the wider public, Schwitters has been a major influence in much modern art. One of the pieces in the current show is on loan from Jasper Johns; two others are owned by Elsworth Kelly.
Schwitters is most famous for his collages and assemblages, made of discarded and worthless materials. He didn’t invent the collage; Picasso and Braque did. But he shifted the collage from its cubist origins through the inventive use of urban trash. What the show gives us is eighty pieces and a small reconstruction of part of his organic, constantly evolving house sculpture and structure (The Merzbau).
Train tickets, chocolate wrappers, bits of paper, any material that was soiled, abraded, crumpled was used for his constructions. Gauze, netting, transparent cellophane were also among his favorite materials. The nuances of gray and brown that are so prevalent in the his works (and in the show) is partially due to his choice of materials but also caused by exposure to light and the natural disintegration of materials that were never meant to last.
Schwitters' collages were not meant merely to shock, annoy, puzzle or defy the conventions of society. "What we are expressing in our work," he once said, "is neither idiocy nor subjective play, but the expression of our time as dictated by the time itself."
In his collages, spatial relationships are suggested, images shift against text, and fragments are overlaid with color or more textured materials. There is no narrative, there is only (usually) - as if only were an adequate word - of the direct experience of art.
He works with and against the picture plane to create shifting surfaces, ostensibly abstract but often layered with text and numbers. "His collages," wrote Critic Diego Valeri, "are little miracles—tasteful, sensitive, communicative, and even touching. To the unwary eye, they may seem mere exercises in patience. But to the discriminating onlooker, they turn out to be small but exquisite works of art."
But the work is not always exquisite. Organized in rough chronological order, the earlier work is lighter, more free and subtly beautiful within a limited color range of greys and tans. As the years progress, Schwitter's isn't afraid to create works that are "ugly," to experiment with clots of material, decaying wood fragments, denser, more organic looking, to roughly dab paint over newsprint or to hammer together crude constructions.
A small portion of the Hanover Merzbau has been recreated in pristine white, by the stage designer Peter Bissegger. It feels too clean and sterile. The original Marzbau was supposedly a repository of secrets and relics, Characterized by Hans Richter as "a proliferation that never ceased," the Merzbau was a vast, organic enterprise destined to grow unchecked. But one can hardly fault the museum for not being able to recreate a structure that evolved over a 20 year period and which was completely destroyed in WW II.
When Adolf Hitler came along, Schwitters' day was over. He spoke out against the Nazis when he had the chance. In 1937, he fled Germany ahead of the Gestapo. His works had been banned—along with the products of his fellow Dadaists. They had been confiscated from the museums and displayed, along with many others, in the infamous show of "degenerate" art.
For a while he settled in Norway. But when the Nazis invaded Norway, he fled again, to England, where he was interned on the Isle of Man. Poor and ill, he never stopped working until his death in 1948, at the age of 60.
The more one sees of Schwitters, the more one recognizes his influence, not only in Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, but Kleinholtz, the SF Beats with their love of urban decay, the contemporary conceptual artists. He's the inspiration for Pop Art, Fluxus, and Conceptual Art to site-specific art, and the forerunner of present day artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Gregor Schneider and Rachel Whiteread.
"I KNOW that I am important as a factor in the development of art and always will remain so," Dadaist Kurt Schwitters wrote in 1931. "I say this with all possible emphasis so that nobody afterwards can say: The poor man didn't even know how important he was.' But he knew and after viewing the show in Berkeley, the viewer will know it as well.
The museum has an exciting series of events planned around the show which include lectures and several collage making Sunday afternoon workshops: Matt Gonzalez (August 14), William Theophilus Brown (September 19) and Veronica de Jesus (October 9).
First part of the review: http://www.examiner.com/museum-in-san-francisco/kurt-schwitters-color-and-collage-at-the-berkeley-art-museum
Sound recordings of Schwitters' reading his own works: http://www.ubu.com/sound/schwitters.html
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