Invasion of the car park people

When I was a kid, I always fancied becoming the person who put the squodgy white and yellow lines along the road with that great little machine on wheels. In that line of work the high moment of creative release must be to invent the little people who turn up on walkways in the best car parks.  (This would have been the ideal job for L S Lowry.) Though today’s regulation stencilled people are a bit of a cop-out, there are still wonderful freehand examples to be discovered. Here’s a quick collage of a few I’ve snapped recently. Don’t tell me I need to get out more often. I visit plenty of car parks.

Kurt rejoined: Schwitters in Lakeland

A greyish day on a Lake District holiday is an opportunity for a pilgrimage to the modest shrine to Kurt Schwitters at the Armitt Museum in Ambleside. (For a previous post on Schwitters, see here.) Some years ago I searched the Lakes in vain for any traces of his presence, but now the Armitt sports a tidy little room with some thirty items. The weight is towards the effective but surprisingly conventional landscapes and portraits that were his bread and butter at the time, but there are a couple of Merz pieces too, plus – holy of holies – the faded sign to the now disembowelled MerzBarn at Elterwater. In the churchyard down the road at St Mary’s survives the headstone to the grave from which Schwitters’s body was removed to Hanover in 1970. Further south at Kendal the Abbot Hall Art Gallery hosts a small wall of Schwitters. All in all, a very worthwhile and tourable grouping of relics.

The Armitt room

The Abbot Hall wall

Barbara Crossley’s The Triumph of Kurt Schwitters, published in 2005 by the Armitt Trust, does not list or discuss in detail the works of this period, but does chronicle painstakingly his last years in the Lakes, following his release from internment in the Isle of Man in late 1941. Notwithstanding the self-sacrificial love and support of Schwitters’s partner Edith Thomas, it’s depressing to learn of the artist reduced to hanging about an Ambleside café, offering portrait sketches to customers for the price of a cup of tea, or working desperately on the barn, breathless and dying, his hands blue with the cold. It comes as a shock to realise that Schwitters died at the age of sixty. The subsequent neglect of his surviving work, followed by litigious bickering as prices later rose, does not make for good reading either. (Not that things are necessarily more sympathetic today. In the Armitt I was obliged to grit my teeth as some saloon bar know-it-all in hiking boots opined dismissively to his mate that the collages were “just patterns,” and that many of the works were probably labelled “Untitled” because the artist knew no English. )

Reviewing all this, I’m struck once again by the uncanny, almost miraculous even-handedness with which Schwitters maintained the two extreme polarities of his practice: the canon-busting inventiveness by which his collages bypass all expectations and still reach entirely satisfactory solutions, balanced by the comprehensive sanity of the observational work, as witnessed, among others, by the touching little pen and ink study of flowers at the Armitt.

Some of the Armitt and Abbot Hall items show up on the Art UK Schwitters page, but others are missing or beyond the scope of the site, so here are some selected snaps. (Click for enlarged slides. Any objections to my posting these, please contact me.) At the top left of the “YMCA Flag” collage is a portion of the envelope in which Schwitters received news of a grant towards the MerzBarn work from MOMA New York. Sorry about the reflections in this one; I find myself incorporated by the glass.

Lake District Landscape 1942

Old Mill, Ambleside 1945-7

Bridge House, Ambleside 1945

Silver Howe, Grasmere 1945

Study of Flowers 1940

Mier Bitte 1945-7

Collage 1947

YMCA Flag Ambleside 1947

Flight 1945

Relief 1946

MerzBarn sign

The taking of these photos coincided with a strange camera malfunction (perhaps more a photographer malfunction, if truth be told) in which entirely unfamiliar images arrived in the camera’s memory, while shots of Schwitters’s works deleted themselves only to reappear at will later. Unnerving. But all quite appropriate to a MerzBarn from which the Merz has been excavated and a grave that no longer holds a body.

Churchyard selfie at the MerzStone

Hannah Hoch stitches it up

And so to Hannah Hoch at the Whitechapel, on till 23 March. Despite the thousand pieces of poor GSCE artwork “inspired” by her collages, the prolific but always fascinating “Dadosophess” seems suddenly to be very much of this moment, and I found the gallery gratifyingly crowded by tall, serious young people, many in black knitwear.

Here are a few sneaky snaps of pieces that might not be easily found elsewhere online. (Forgive the grainy ‘phone images. Must get a better ‘phone …)

Weisse Form (White Form), 1919

Fahrt ins Unbekannte (Journey into the Unknown), 1956

Epos, 1957

Entartet (Degenerate), 1969

And a few thoughts:

• This show is almost entirely of collages, but her paintings are often even more impressive.

• Her early abstractions derive from a professional preoccupation with pattern and patterns – textile and crochet. Her Vom Sticken of 1917-18 is a modernist manifesto of embroidery, no less.

• As a good dressmaker, Hoch rarely attempts to disguise the seams in her collages. You are confronted by images that first appear unified, but then promptly deconstruct themselves into their constituent parts, only to reassemble moments later. They are alive within that flicker.

• Was she as overtly anti-racist as today’s commentaries suggest? I’m not so sure. The use of black faces in some collages seems to me to be meant more as an aesthetic jolt than as a political one. But I guess that, whatever the intention, that in itself was taking an almighty risk in ‘thirties Germany.

• Her Album scrapbook of magazine photos is strongly reminiscent of Francis Bacon’s way of working. Except of course that Bacon, being a bloke, chucked his images all over the floor.

• It comes as a surprise to find that she was active into the early 1970’s – from the era of Johannes Baader into that of Baader-Meinhof, in fact. Post war, she found a renewed preoccupation with abstraction; not the reductive abstraction of constructivism, but an abstraction of accretion, of self-complicating and fantastic forms.

I very much recommend this, if you find yourself in London. Far more rewarding than *ahem* Richard Hamilton at Tate Mod.

Kurt thoughts: Britters in Schwitain

From notes made on my way round the Schwitters in Britain show at Tate Britain:

Constant tensions between colour and texture, forms and references.

Colour – So much brown! But the landscapes and portraits too, even in the skin tones, appear predominantly brown. Seems regressive – the dull cubist palette of Picasso & Braque. But his colour cheers up a bit once he is released from the internment camp!

Forms – Constructivist? How much chance? What laws do his compositions obey? Any?

References (found material) – Social & personal history. He claimed to sit light to the original significances of found material and of elements of text. But it clearly wasn’t so. (An abundance of bus tickets indicates a prevalence of buses. In London, judging by the collages, he ate an awful lot of Liquorice Allsorts. He does not appear to have eaten Kendal Mint Cake during the Lake District period.)

Untitled, 1942 (Note Liquorice Allsorts)

[Thought: a philatelist notices an extremely rare stamp glued into a Schwitters collage … Thought: British Counter-intelligence analyses his British collages, suspecting them to be coded messages.]

In the collages the upside-down elements (writing, images) are sometimes quite dominant. Did Schwitters work both/all ways up until the final resolution?

His process? Tension between congruences and incongruences. Exercises in daring. Relentless oddness. Defies Ben Nicholson’s tastefulness. Nicholson called Schwitters “an ass and a bore”. (Nicholson could be, in Sven Berlin’s words, “a cold, spiteful little sod”.)

The later paintings and small sculptures move towards a more lyrical, clean, hard edged colourfulness, lose their grubbiness, even take on a strange hint of style. But this threat of taste is always carefully recuperated by some element or small fragment of anti-taste. Allure, then deflection. A sideways step.

Schwitters, ‘Lovely Portrait,’ 1942

Schwitters, portrait of George Johnston, 1946

Asger Jorn, ‘The avant-garde doesn’t give up painting,’ 1962

In Untitled (Lovely Portrait), 1942, Schwitters paints over an existing Victorian portrait, leaving only the face from the original. See Asger Jorn’s interventions (“defigurations”). But unlike Jorn, Schwitters did not disrespect the original, given that he was a conventional portraitist himself. See also Joyce Cary’s Gully Jimson (The Horse’s Mouth) buying an old Rembrandt to paint over in place of a new canvas. Also, Duchamp’s “anti-readymade” notion of using a Rembrandt as an ironing board – though that works only as an idea, not as an object. The portrait painted over by Schwitters as an anti-readymade?

[Thought: in 1943 in London Schwitters was in contact with Jankel Adler. Adler was in close contact with Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde. They could have seen Schwitters’s work on show alongside Adler’s in 1944. Could Schwitters have met the Two Roberts? If so, they may hardly have understood each other.]

Despite the two new works in this show (elaborate, self-indulgent, ignorable) commissioned to honour the “Lake District legacy” of Schwitters, there is no such legacy. One wet Lakeland weekend some years ago, I failed to find any trace of his time in Ambleside. (Though recently the Armitt Collection has started to pull things together.)

Before I viewed this show, I thought that I understood Schwitters’s work. Now I find that I don’t. But I like it all the more for that.

The Hostility of the Luminarist: some collages by Peter Hatton

One or two people have said how much they liked the late ‘seventies collages by Wakefield artist and film maker Peter Hatton in my last but one post, which chronicled artists behaving badly. So here are some more. Shamefully, these are all I can find, and they are not originals but photocopies that Peter sent to me at the time, paper creases included. The three slightly Max Ernst-ish pieces and the Hostility series were shown at the Breadline Gallery, Rodley, Leeds in 1979. On the copy of The Patient (my favourite) Pete noted: “This one sold to Trevor who sold it to someone else.”  Trevor being Trevor Whetstone, Breadline’s owner and much loved local art hero. The four concluding Burroughsian photo-collages, to my mind, hesitate to interfere with the found texts and images as forcefully as they might, but what the heck – they still carry some weight.

Hardly representative of a lifetime’s work, but better than nothing.

Click the thumbnails for bigger images.

The Patient

Cityscape

The Surgeon

Hostility series