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Kurt Schwitters in England: 1940 - 1948
Themerson first met Schwitters when they happened to sit next to each other at a meeting of the PEN Club held to celebrate 300 years of John Milton's Aeropagitica, at the French Institute, London, 1943. It seems that they quickly recognised shared values (not least in what Themerson called 'making havoc of the classification system'). They became friends. Schwitters paid visits to the Themersons at home in Maida Vale, and they remained in intermittent contact until his death in 1948. Kurt Schwitters' reputation as a major German dadaist meant nothing when he arrived in Britain as an alien in 1940. When after months of internment, principally in the Isle of Man, he came to London in 1941 he was still an outsider, and he remained virtually unknown as an artist outside a tiny avant-garde circle throughout his years in England. When Themerson met him, he was living with his son Ernst in Barnes. Schwitters had met and befriended Edith Thomas ('Wantee', as he called her), and from 1944 on they lived together. In 1945 they moved to Ambleside in the Lake District. In February 1958, Themerson gave a talk about Schwitters at the Gaberbocchus Common Room. The text of his talk became the introduction to this book. Themerson saw the art of collage as a political act in Schwitters' hands, an heroic gesture against conventions. The way that the Themersons designed the book also expresses this liberation, almost like a collage itself, with its various coloured papers and insertions. Stefan Themerson's irreverent improvisation with the Court Circular title and crest from The Times as a cover design is also very Schwitters-like, in idea and in technique. The critic of The Connoisseur wrote of 'one of the most lively examples of book design published in England recently... with a binding design of outrageous ingenuity. The inside is as unorthodox as befits its subject and the whole effect is most refreshing.' Stefan Themerson published another version of the text, visually and typographically elaborated, under the title 'Kurt Schwitters on a time-chart', in Typographica 16, December 1967. Here, Schwitters is placed in the broad context of world culture, the avant-garde and political history, stretching from 1880 to the new attitudes of the 1960s, and incorporating Milton's words on Liberty. The story of PIN, the poetry journal that Schwitters and Raoul Hausmann were planning to launch together in the 1940s, was also published by Gaberbocchus Press, edited by Jasia Reichardt, in 1962. Items on display 1. Photograph of Kurt Schwitters by Ernst Schwitters, c.1945. 2. The P.E.N. Society, notice of the conference in August 1944, at which Stefan Themerson and Kurt Schwitters met. 3. Kurt Schwitters, Christmas card, December 1945 4. Letter to the Themersons from Schwitters and Wantee, dated 12.3.46 5. Eve Blossom has wheels, typescript of Schwitters’ poem, typed by Wantee. 6. Stefan Themerson, manuscript of first page of lecture text, Cambridge,1961. 7. Stefan Themerson, Kurt Schwitters in England:
1940 –1948 8. Stefan Themerson, Kurt Schwitters in England:
1940 –1948, p.46 10. Stefan Themerson, Kurt Schwitters in England: 1940 –1948, p.7 11. Kurt Schwitters, copy of an untitled collage,
1944 13. Stefan Themerson, Kurt Schwitters in England:1940 – 1948, pp.32-33 14. Stefan Themerson, design for front cover, pen and ink, collage. 15. Stefan Themerson, Kurt Schwitters in England:
1940 – 1948 16. Stefan Themerson, original design for
the Gaberbocchus emblem, collage, c.1955. |
In
1958, this was the first publication of Kurt Schwitters' English poems
and prose, and — apart from an important article by Robert Motherwell
(in Dada Painters and Poets, NY 1951) — Stefan's Themerson's introduction
was the first significant English text on the artist.