Hans Richter, City College of New York, 1948
Hans Richter
Translated by Christopher Middleton
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
DelMonico Books • Prestel
Munich • London • New York
Published in conjunction with the exhibition Hans Richter: Encounters at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (May 5–September 2, 2013) and the Centre Pompidou-Metz (September 29, 2013–February 24, 2014).
Copyright © 2013 Hans Richter Estate
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage and retrieval system or otherwise, without written permission from the copublishers.
Editor: Sara Cody
Associate Editor: Phil Graziadei
Designer: Maja Blazejewska
Photo Editor: Dawson Weber
Production Manager: Karen Farquhar
LACMA Publications:
Head of Publications: Lisa Gabrielle Mark
Senior Editor: Sara Cody
Editor: Jennifer MacNair Stitt
Associate Editor: Phil Graziadei
Administrative Assistant: Tricia Cochée
Rights and Reproductions: Piper Severance, Jeanne Dreskin, and Dawson Weber
Copublished in 2013 by Los Angeles County Museum of Art and DelMonico Books, an imprint of Prestel Publishing
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eISBN 978-3-641-11754-2
Frontis: Hans Richter, Dragonfly (Counterpoint in Red, Black, Gray, and White), 1943, detail, oil on canvas, 29 ½ x 15 ½ in., private collection.
© Hans Richter Estate, photo © 2013 Museum Associates/LACMA
Editor’s Foreword
Preface
Introduction
I. The Search for Absolute Freedom
Mr. Dada
Dada? Dada!
Arp—Rising Behind a Cloud
Merz
Raoul Hausmann
Hannah Höch
Lajos Kassák
II. The Search for Absolute Order
Piet Mondrian
Kazimir Malevich
Mies van der Rohe—The Builder
The Search for New Sounds
III. The Search for the Marvelous (Surrealism)
Georges Méliès
Max Ernst
Joseph Cornell
Jean Cocteau
Emmy Hennings
Man Ray
Alexander Calder
The Buildings Series
IV. The Search for Reality
The Search for Reality
George Grosz
Dada Monteur
A Rare Person: Ferdinand Hardekopf
A Homeric Figure: Robert J. Flaherty
Sergei Eisenstein
Federico Fellini
V. The Search for the Future
Frederick Kiesler
Happenings, Concept Art, the Metaphysical Hole, Eternity, and Magic
VI. The Search for Nothingness
Marcel Duchamp
VII. The Search for the Facts of Art History
Art is Superfluous
Bauer and the Baroness
“Joy in Another Person’s Being”
VIII. On Growing Old
Lyonel Feininger
Piet Mondrian
Fernand Léger
Yves Tanguy
Hans Arp
Julius Bissier
Marcel Duchamp
Postscript
Artists Mentioned in the Text
Endnotes
Hans Richter, Zurich, 1959.
Photo: J. Bruell, Zurich
This publication of Encounters from Dada till Today marks the first time that Hans Richter’s memoir, originally published in German in 1973 as Begegnungen von Dada bis heute, has appeared in English. In the chapter titled “The Search for New Sounds,” Richter comments that “in modern visual art (e.g., the use of computers), endeavors are afoot that will enlarge the range of auditory and visual experience with the aid of twentieth-century science and technology. Where this will have led to fifty years from now, only our children and grandchildren will know.” In this light, producing Encounters from Dada till Today in e-book and print-on-demand formats seems particularly apt for such a forward-thinking artist who spent his career constantly embracing advancements in technology and new ways of communicating.
Born in Berlin in 1888, Richter was a pioneering avant-garde painter and filmmaker at the center of some of most important movements of the early twentieth century, including Expressionism, Dadaism, Constructivism, and Surrealism. Forced out of Germany by Hitler’s regime in 1933, he eventually immigrated to the United States in 1941, where he became an influential film teacher and a productive writer, and continued to paint well into the final years of his life. His book Dada: Art and Anti-Art (published in German in 1964 and in English in the following year) quickly became a major reference, eventually being translated into nine languages and still in print today.
Following Art and Anti-Art, Richter turned to assembling the highly personal collection of memories, anecdotes, and episodes that are presented here. Encounters from Dada till Today reads as a virtual Who’s Who of the twentieth-century avant-garde, with Hans Arp, Alexander Calder, Jean Cocteau, Joseph Cornell, Marcel Duchamp, Federico Fellini, Emmy Hennings, Hannah Höch, Allan Kaprow, Kazimir Malevich, Man Ray, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Kurt Schwitters, Dorothea Tanning, and Tristan Tzara (to name literally just a few) all making appearances in its pages. Though Richter was fluent in English by this time—he once quipped that he taught himself the language primarily by reading Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett novels—he wrote in German, and so would eventually need a suitable translator.
In early 1967, Richter began corresponding with British poet and translator Christopher Middleton, an instructor at the University of Texas at Austin who had written about Dadaism and Expressionism and, by that time, had begun to introduce the English-speaking world to the work of Swiss writer Robert Walser. Middleton recalls that the two met in person, probably later that year, at an event organized by literary scholar Roger Shattuck at UT-Austin. Today he recalls Richter’s charisma: “a very amusing and charming man, but also someone whose significance you understood right away.” The two met again in Locarno, Switzerland, in late 1969, and probably discussed translating Richter’s new book by the early 1970s.
Begegnungen von Dada bis heute was published in Germany in 1973, and Middleton produced his translation in 1974 (with some content altered slightly from the German edition). But due to Richter’s illnesses and advancing age, the English edition remained unpublished. After Richter’s death in 1976, Middleton’s typewritten manuscript was deposited in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center at UT-Austin.
Nearly thirty years later, Timothy O. Benson, curator of the Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, began working on what would become the first major Richter exhibition since the late 1980s. Inspired by Richter’s own acknowledgment of the importance of his interactions with other artists throughout his life, Benson titled the exhibition Hans Richter: Encounters, conceiving it as an examination of Richter’s work in the context of the social dimensions of his career. Additionally, with the passionate support of the Richter Estate—particularly administrator Veronica Boswell and curator/archivist Erik de Bourbon-Parme—the idea emerged to issue Encounters from Dada till Today as a companion volume to the exhibition catalogue.
In Mary DelMonico, of DelMonico Books • Prestel, we found an enthusiastic partner in this endeavor. My former LACMA colleague, Thomas Frick, kindly put me in touch with Christopher Middleton, who not only gave the project his blessing but graciously took the time to recall his own encounters with Richter more than forty years ago. Our photo editor, Dawson Weber, worked with the indefatigable Erik de Bourbon-Parme in finding just the right images to illustrate as many of Richter’s friendships as possible. Designer Maja Blazejewska created the perfect complement to her striking exhibition catalogue. My fellow editor Phil Graziadei and I have approached the material with a light hand, adding in a few necessary explications and updates while endeavoring to remain as true as possible to Middleton’s graceful interpretation of Richter’s original voice.
And what a voice it is—at turns witty and incisive, lyrical and compassionate, giving each of his subjects, no matter how obscure or famous, what he calls “the small eternity to which everyone is entitled.” Richter’s empathy, without sentimentality, is present on every page. There is Ferdinand Hardekopf, once “the idol of the pre-1914 younger generation,” whose later masterwork is lost somewhere in the French countryside as the poet flees the Nazi invasion of Paris; there is the somber gathering at dawn at a Grand Central Station café after Richter and a small group of friends witness the death of Piet Mondrian; there is the dark comedy that unfolds when collector Hilla Rebay attempts to convince Solomon R. Guggenheim that “the greatest modern artist of all” is none other than . . . Rudolf Bauer.
Richter’s assessment of Raoul Hausmann is particularly striking. Regarding the perpetually embittered Dadaist—known as much for his general misanthropy as for his seminal photocollages, assemblages, and sound poems—with genuine tenderness and respect, he notes that in a world “which for eighty years had noticed him little or not at all . . . [Hausmann] devoted his whole life to the creative element that he bore within him.”
“Meanwhile,” Richter writes, “the wheel of history goes on turning. We are all ground to powder. Grain and chaff fly up, all mixed together, until everything is clarified—until, at some turn or another, the wheel suddenly stops, and Sisyphus is finally called away from his labor.” For me, this project has felt the very opposite of Sisyphean, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to help bring Encounters from Dada till Today into the light. It is a remarkable volume—one that not only documents an array of fascinating historical periods and figures, but ultimately suggests a more humane way to be present in the world: collaboratively, creatively, and above all, generously.
Sara Cody
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Participants at the International Congress of Constructivists and Dadaists, Weimar, Germany, 1922; left to right: Kurt Schwitters, Hans Arp, Max Burchartz, Lotte Burchartz, Hans Richter, Nelly van Doesburg, Cornelis van Eesteren, Theo van Doesburg, Peter Röhl, Alexa Röhl, Werner Graeff
Many of the encounters described in this book go back fifty years or more. Nonetheless, they belong to the present.
They are preserved, as present events, in countless small cells in my brain. It was the great neurologist Wilder Penfield who succeeded in localizing memory centers in the cortex, and in bringing up into surface consciousness, by electrical impulses, experiences that had been completely forgotten. Memory is a library, permanently present and of infinite capacity, or it is like a computer in which events and experiences are stored and available for recall: people, objects, situations. A postcard, a newspaper clipping, a tree, an armchair, a pair of white socks—any of these can become the impulse that brings a person, an object, a situation, back to mind again. Long-forgotten things become unforgettable.
Thus I encounter the living past of other persons, and my own. I rediscover everyday events, and most unusual events. They all manifest in the form of the original impression, and with the intensity of that impression. As I re-experience them, they gain in depth, they become signatures of a development, and they acquire importance, as signposts pointing backward or forward.
The form, the content, and the occasion of each encounter commemorate the unrepeatable particular person, and give him the small eternity to which everyone is entitled.
The history of art unfolds through positions and counterpositions, claims and counterclaims, sayings and gainsayings: in the search for an absolute freedom, as in Dada; or for an absolute order and discipline, as in Mondrian; in the search for the marvelous, the blue flower of the Romantics,1 for a new magic; or in the search for reality, a sociopolitical content. Everywhere, again and again, there is the search for the “new,” for the future.
These are the themes of my book: I treat them, not as art historical theories, but as the life themes of particular artists, in marginalia, which may happen to speak for the endeavors of the passing generations.
We are all part of this dynamic process, which is mirrored in art, mirrored in the “Happenings,” too, which are all around us, in one form or another.
I found the materials for this chronicle in the countless letters and documents received from artist friends and colleagues over a period of fifty years. They speak of individuals, their everyday problems, and their endeavors to carry out a task set by their times and by their own natures. Men possessed, who had to express themselves. Showing what artists and art have done as agents of this process—that is the aim of this book.
“If everyone is mad, people who are not mad are mad.”
Sigmund Freud
André Breton and Tristan Tzara, 1920
Tristan Tzara, incredible aficionado of lightning intuitions, compelled by his cast of mind to construct being in the midst of nothingness: optimist, egoist, romantic Communist, individualist, iridescent salamander, as in the tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann—a prince in the daytime, at night a line to hang the washing from. A self-powered satellite orbiting everything, especially itself, emitting signals of the joys of life—sensitive and aggressive, a magician with the alacrity of a weasel, arousing trust and suspicion.
Fired by ambition and craving success but steered by spirit and comradeship, you were first a member of the Zurich Dada group, and then its leader. Our conversations in the 1950s, although I had had hardly any personal contact with you for more than thirty years, could take up where they had left off in Zurich—as if the coffee in our cups at the Café Odéon were still hot, as if we were still, as then, grilling the bourgeoisie, the spit having turned long ago, as if our advanced age were the proper confirmation of our youth, as if we were not at all two white-haired old men entrenched in their chosen positions regardless of who might be young around them.
What a swashbuckling, happy-go-lucky person you were, threshing joyously around in life and with it, as if that were what it was meant for. But this condemned you always to have to be climbing in order to stay on top—whereas there really is no top and no bottom, except in the perspectives of our vanity.
When I protested, in Les Deux Magots, against the launching of dogs into space for experimental purposes, you raised your voice—the room was very crowded—as if you meant to extract from some popular assembly a great “Yea.” “Man! Man! Man!” you shouted, as if a dog were no such thing. The beauty of it is, and always was, that we both knew how much playacting is involved in such moments. Sometimes one owes it to oneself, or then again one owes it to the public. On this level we always understood each other and remained friends: you respected my performance, and I respected yours. And this is the comical side of it. But it is also the reason why you ultimately got the worst of it in the battle with André Breton, the humorless one, over the leadership of Dada in Paris. You could pretend, of course, to take serious matters seriously, but ultimately your one concern was to reduce all issues to the question of “whether a locomotive is more modern than a top hat,”2 and this is what showed you were no match for Breton.
Eventually it was this that saved you, you and Dada. This satyr play in which you were the protagonist.
People who envied you called you a climber because you had arrived where they wanted to be. Your enemies castigated you for being treacherous, because sometimes their powers of intrigue were inferior to yours. You were neither angel nor devil—except at times for your lady friends. You used all the tricks you knew, and there were many, whenever you had the chance. You had that shrewd innocence that makes one feel that any obstacle in one’s path is an actual injustice. You had all the faults of which you were accused. But you were ten times more gifted than your accusers.
Your conjuring tricks, such as making chance poems out of clippings from newspapers—I was never convinced by them. More convincing was the beyond-anarchistic tone of your intoxicating manifestos (they intoxicated you as well as us). You didn't long for the dissolution of the self like the so much more morbid Walter Serner. You did not like the chaos of moral despair; on the contrary, you liked giving shape to existence, and that meant “the end of art achieved by art,” chaos laid bare, like a soccer field where you were allowed to act as referee.
The fact that Dada became a magical word was not due to Hugo Ball or Hans Arp, nor was it due to Hausmann, Grosz, Schwitters, Ernst, Breton, or Eluard. It was due to this passionate provocateur, this cunning Tristan—who then, quite suddenly, reappeared as a 100 percent Communist.3
But while the party-line themes were clamoring out of you, you devoted yourself to the story of the Princesse de Clèves, or to writing a biography of the poet-tramp Villon—or to any other plans you had, your shields against boredom, plans that might give you the chance to devise ways in which to combine literature and life and efficiency in business.
At 5 rue de Lille you were surrounded by the magical dangers of innumerable African statuettes, which watched every movement you made; thus you were a small white-haired demon who had, under no circumstances, given up asking whether a locomotive is more modern than a top hat.
When I heard that you were dangerously ill in 1963, I wrote at once to cheer you up. I received your reply three weeks after your death—it came with a new edition of your Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries. You said you were better and hoped to see me soon. That statement is like an echo of your whole life: affirmative, beyond death.
Marcel Janco, 1920s
When Marcel Janco said “da-da,” Tristan Tzara answered “da-da.” In this way they confirmed and affirmed one another. And thus it was that Dada was born, long before later claimants to the invention of the name or of the movement came forward.
These two Romanians were as vitally important to Dada’s birth and development as were Hugo Ball and Hans Arp, Emmy Hennings and Walter Serner—as were all of us—but somewhat more so.
Janco, the youngest of the original Dadaists, belonged from the start to the pro-art movement, not to anti-art. In this he differed from his compatriot Tzara and even more so from the New York group to which Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia belonged, not to mention the Dada riot squad in Berlin. But Tzara had built a bridge that joined the opposite sides: Dada as “the destruction of art by art.”
Meanwhile, as long as art awaited its destruction, Janco contributed to the renewal of art with his dance masks in the Cabaret Voltaire (and later at the Dada performances of the Laban dancers). Other elements of this renewal were his architectonically rich plaster reliefs, in white and in bright colors, or his woodcuts. He had studied architecture. Classical proportions, the idea of harmony, found a place in his work in spite of Dada.
Without ever having heard of Kurt Schwitters—it was still only 1916–17—Janco made assemblages out of all kinds of found objects, discarded items like glass, feathers, wire, mirrors, turning them into vibrant sculptures. Nowadays all this sounds old hat, but at that time the cards were not yet marked, and the new things really were new—without anyone being especially conscious of this novelty. Only when the imitators came along and copies were put forward as “new” were the originators astonished at themselves.
That was indeed the distinguishing mark of this short period of breaking out [Aufbruch] from 1916 to 1920. The decisive thing was doing, not reflecting. Only thus could this breaking out, this breaking off, this breaking through, actually occur. Later these break values, in all their richness, came to be knowingly contrived. But the beginning was, in every case, spontaneous.
Spontaneous, too, was our participation in 1918 in the “reconstruction” of Europe when the war was over. We founded the Association of Radical Artists, to which Janco, Arp, and I belonged, as well as Viking Eggeling and Fritz Baumann in Basel and even older artists, like Walter Helbig and Alexei Jawlensky. We put our ideas forward in the form of a manifesto that we worked out together. This document exists, with my manuscript corrections from 1919, made when I was living on my parents’ farm. The text reads like a prophecy of the future, calling for collaboration between teachers and students in academies and universities.
The war had brought us together, and its end just as rapidly bore us apart. I lost contact with Marcel Janco. Just occasionally I heard of him through his Bucharest art magazine Contimporanul; but then the end of the world was upon us, and everything and everyone seemed to be lost.
Thirty years had passed, and then by chance I met his daughter, who told me they were living in Israel. Later, when he visited me in Switzerland in Ascona, the fragile Marcel had become the robust burgomaster of Ein Hod, an artists’ community in Israel—a senior citizen and a recognized painter in his new homeland. He was a flourishing Israeli now, his time divided between cultivating a vineyard and working as a painter and organizer.
Everything connected with Dada affects him personally: the non-Dadaists who were smuggled into the fiftieth-anniversary shows in Zurich and Paris, the smoke screens released by former comrades who were there, as well as the transgressions of the art critics who were not. He curses all that. He wants to keep the original Dada experience, as it was for him (and for every one of us), in all its fullness pure and present.
He keeps a sharp lookout, lest Dada become a ship adrift on the ocean of art historical error.
Hans Richter, Hans Arp, and Ben Nicholson, 1963
Many decades ago, in the cellar of Arp’s house in Meudon, thousands of tiny bones were lying about, snails, vases, steles, breasts and other feminine rotundities—all of them unborn beings made of plaster. Lying there unfinished, they seemed to multiply among themselves, the beginnings of sculptures issuing from Arp’s never idle hands.
I was on friendly terms with Arp for fifty years, from 1916 during Dada in Zurich until his death in Basel in 1966. During the last ten years of his life we had neighboring studios in the pleasant garden courtyard of the Italian-Swiss sculptor Remo Rossi, who built these studios for us. I could often observe my friend at his work and amid all the comings and goings that attended it. His reverse-montage technique, for instance—not adding anything, but cutting things away—fascinated me. The moment his assistant, Alberto Meli, had finished a plaster figure following Arp’s directions, Arp would cut it in half, saw parts off, and position the parts otherwise or attach the parts to other figures, or simply make two figures out of a single one.
At times, fragile marble sculptures would come back from an exhibition in pieces. These pieces then had to pursue their separate lives. Thus among some fragments I found a “hen” or a female “breast” to which I took a liking. Since Arp wanted to have something of mine, he suggested I should take this breast-fragment by way of exchange. That was how I became the possessor of a classically simple marble bust, which had originally been the upper part of a sculpture with an altogether different composition.
Female anatomical parts constituted the reservoir from which Arp extracted his classical de-formations. Sometimes, toward the end of his life, his sculptures evolved more constructively, with planes sharply incised and cut off, but still always bearing the marks of his hand as it had molded them.
While he talked, I made sketches of him; that is I used the perfect egg shape of his head and the pyramid of his nose as a starting point for endless variations, as I had been doing since 1916. He wrote: “Hans Richter has drawn heads whose several noses are artistically entwined like pretzels (baked in a limited edition), diabolical cloud-heads, in whose presence anyone who is not an automobile-centaur should cross himself devoutly. He has also drawn heads of writers, heads that declare that only their own eggs are fresh—and then eat them . . . ” And elsewhere: “Looking at Richter’s work I am as gratified as when I look at my own. So I can sing of my friend’s work in words I find when contemplating my own.”
We exhibited together at Denise René’s gallery in Paris. On that occasion I wrote:
“Chance is your guardian angel,” I assured him.
Without giddiness or guile or guilt,
You leap from one high tightrope to another.
And:
My picture Arp Rising behind a Cloud
Arose benevolently in 1918 near Wolfsberg, Zurich.
The cloud has vanished (the picture, too, alas).
But finally Arp has risen above all the clouds.
I made dozens of Arp variations for the title page to the second issue of the magazine Der Zeltweg, named after the street in which Arp had his studio from 1916 to 1919. The second issue never appeared, but a few of these variations on the Arp theme still exist.
Meanwhile, Arp moved in 1963 with forty of his works into the old Visconti castello in Locarno: an Arp museum, with Roman foundation walls still intact, meant for eternity. Remo Rossi, our landlord in the group of studios—the kibbutz, as Arp called it, where besides us Italo Valenti and Fritz Glarner and various transient artists worked—had made this freezing, gigantic castle habitable. Habitable for works of art, at least. At the opening ceremony, the burgomaster, Signor Speziali, made Arp an honorary citizen of Locarno (Arp was already a sick man by then). Later, thanks to Rossi, an Arp Park was established at the lido, on Lake Maggiore, with over a dozen Arp torsos and sculptures glowing in the midst of it.
Arp’s health got worse and worse, but he not only kept traveling between his studios in Meudon and Locarno, he and his tireless wife Marguerite also visited our old friend Janco in Israel, flew to Yucatan in Mexico after his exhibition in the United States, and he was planning to go to Hamburg to receive an important prize. He was unable to go. In Basel, on the way to Hamburg, though his spirit sustained him, his heart was too weakened to do so.
The mad dog Hitler scattered us during the 1930s to the various ends of the earth. Those who stayed in Germany had to be cautious regarding their correspondence abroad, and those who were already outside hardly dared to compromise those who had stayed by writing letters to them.
So it came about that I heard nothing from Kurt Schwitters for ten years. Only toward the end of Hitler’s so-called Thousand-Year Reich did mail even from unoccupied Europe reach America. Nelly van Doesburg wrote to me that Schwitters had become a refugee, escaping via Norway to England, and that he was ill. I sat down at once and wrote to him. He wrote back saying he was better, and that thanks to his friend Edith Thomas, he was able to work again. Schwitters as I knew him would never have allowed illness to prevent him from working. He was the most ceaselessly productive and fertile person I have ever known. There was always something working through him, in him, and out of him.
Sometimes when visiting Berlin he had stayed with me. Early one morning, after an apparently good night’s sleep, there he was in the kitchen, with two collages ready for gluing. Even before we had breakfast the glue had to be made up—from flour and water.
This tall, robust Hanoverian had never been ill in all the years I had known him, so I took no notice of his present illness. Far from it; I suggested to him that we should make a film of his Ursonate (Sonata in Primal Sounds), the sounds of which were still vivid to me, though twenty years had passed since I heard them in the Potsdam house of Frau Kiepenheuer. As expected, he took up the idea at once and suggested that I should make the film in “spirals.” In my reply I objected to this, on the grounds that the text and the rhythm in his performance were, properly speaking, dramatic, more suited to wave forms rising and falling. But I said that if he felt the endless form of the spiral to be more suitable, then I would see what could be done about a spiraloscopic film sequence.
Then came a letter in which he told me he had plans to make a gramophone record of the Ursonate for the BBC. Then silence. . . . Not long afterward, I heard from Raoul Hausmann in Limoges, France, that Schwitters was ill again. He and Schwitters had either published or were planning a new Dada magazine called Pin. Their creative friendship lasted to the end.
I was now working on the visual images for the Ursonate, using as much free time as my teaching at City College, New York, allowed me. I had completed most of this work when another letter came from Kurt, with a new idea: I should apply to the Museum of Modern Art for a grant. The museum ought to pay for the film. Schwitters was as much in need of money as I was. This was a good idea, but an unlikely one. A few years previously, in 1942, a number of us (including Charmion Von Wiegand) had persuaded the good lady Rose Fried, who had just opened a gallery in New York, to put on a Kurt Schwitters exhibition. Katherine Dreier, a great patron of the arts, wrote the introduction to the catalogue. It was a gala exhibition of Schwitters’s collages. Not a single person came to the gallery: neither critics, nor museum people, nor art dealers. There were no buyers and no visitors. It was a complete flop.
Now it was understandable that Schwitters, in far-off Westmoreland, England, should believe MoMA capable of paying a penny or two for a film about a work whose maker’s name was virtually unknown. But to explain the situation to him was difficult. I wrote saying that his idea was just a beautiful dream, that nobody in New York knew him, and that all I could do was to put my professor’s salary into making the film. I added that a query from me to the museum, regarding financial support, would make me even less popular there than I already was.
Despite this cautious explanation, Kurt became annoyed, and he insisted on his plan. Eventually, I wrote that I was not a businessman and could do no more than I was already doing. He replied asserting that, as for him, he was a businessman . . . and there the matter rested. So as not to provide him with further materials for discussion, I broke off the argument and left the film as it was—an “Unfinished Ursonate.”
Not long after this a letter came from Nelly, and a very urgent one from Hausmann, with the bad news that Kurt was very ill indeed. This was most worrying, and I wrote to him immediately, enclosing a four-leafed clover for luck, with best wishes for his well-being.
The letter arrived too late. Not Kurt but his son replied, saying that his father could have used all the good luck, but that he had died the day before it was delivered. The sudden death of Kurt Schwitters, so soon after the official end of the general killing in Europe, moved me profoundly.
Never has anyone been so much at home in chaos. But since he knew his way around in chaos so expertly, he was able to fix it up as he liked (or disliked), as his collages show. Finally he took up residence there, and dwelt in chaos in his orderly fashion to the end of his days. While science was annexing new dimensions from chaos by mathematical equations, Schwitters wrested a new order out of the chaos of his chance findings: by rediscovering the things others had thrown away, he gave them a place in the arsenal of creation.
Thereafter, many others have been able to follow his formula. Chaos has developed new dimensions since then, and there is no master such as Kurt to tame it, to put the curb on it again. But his wisdom was large enough to show the way, both to many sycophants and imitators, and to some genuine explorers.
Carl Jung, Hans Richter, Raoul Hausmann, and Man Ray, 1961
In 1966 Hannah Höch returned to her former companion Raoul Hausmann several of his classic and valuable Dada works, which—Hausmann claimed—she had kept for herself after they had parted company forty years before. In a letter to Hausmann, I congratulated him and expressed the fully justified hope that he would welcome this gesture of his former girlfriend in a friendly way, even if not in a spirit of friendship.
For decades, whenever Hannah’s name was mentioned, he had reacted with diabolical hatred—which seemed to stimulate him.
On December 27, 1966, he replied: “If you have lost faith in humankind (as I have), you’ö”“’”