- Artist
- Kurt Schwitters 1887–1948
- Medium
- Plaster, paint
- Dimensions
- Object: 195 × 152 × 60 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Purchased with funds provided by Tate International Council, Tate Members and Art Fund 2018
- Reference
- T15028
Summary
Untitled (The Clown) c.1945–7 consists of a wedge-shaped painted stone atop of which a conical blue plaster form with a red tip balances at an angle. The form suggests a human figure wearing a pointed, clown-style hat; it is an example of how Schwitters was able to combine abstraction with a suggestion of human presence. The work was titled by Schwitters’ partner, Edith Thomas, to reflect these anthropomorphic qualities.
This work is one of a group of small sculptures combining found objects, plaster and paint which collectively form the most important new development in Schwitters’ art during his time living and working in Britain. He settled in London at the end of 1941, having been released from internment on the Isle of Man in November that year. These small sculptures relate to his site-specific Merz Barn 1947–8 (now surviving as the Merz Barn Wall, Hatton Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne) – a plaster construction originally installed in a barn in the Lake District consisting of biomorphic shapes painted and embedded with found natural objects. Schwitters was conscious that his hand-held sculptures represented an important development in his art and wrote to a friend: ‘Here [in Britain] I paint in smaller formats and model in very small pocket-sized format. My sculptures are new for me – they are my best work at present.’ (Schwitters to Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, December 1945, quoted in Luke 2014, p.161). The size of the sculptures was not only determined by aesthetic choice and the small found objects from which they were made, but also reflected Schwitters’ circumstances as an exile; he used the sculptures as a way of exploring ideas on a small, portable scale detached from a specific place, before he was able to realise them on a large, site-specific scale in his final Merz construction, the Merz Barn (Luke 2013, pp.43–4). Schwitters wrote in 1946: ‘I worked on and developed my abstract sculptures. It was good that I did these small sculptures because the Merzbau had been bombed’. He also emphasised their importance as a new development in his art: ‘I am developing a new kind of sculpture from found forms. Very small, not ornamental like the Merzbau. Similar to the MZ [collages]’. (Letters to Hans Richter, 29 March 1946 and Friedrich Vordemberge-Gildewart, 5 January 1946 respectively, quoted in Luke 2013, p.48.)
Schwitters saw the use of painted surfaces in sculpture as a way of combining painting and sculpture into one art, challenging the traditional boundaries that separated the two practices. In November 1945 he wrote to Alfred Barr, Director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, describing this practice: ‘I modellised the colour and form of the surface with paint, so that modellising and painting become only one art’ (quoted in John Elderfield, Kurt Schwitters, London 1985, p.218). Curator and art historian John Elderfield has argued that plaster and paint were used by Schwitters simultaneously as agents of ‘containment and disassociation’ as he coated found objects such as twigs, bones and stones, both using them as armatures and enabling the ‘formal assimilation of things taken from the world’ in the same way as he had done in the Hanover Merzbau. Elderfield asserts that modelling in plaster became more important to Schwitters as he increasingly drew inspiration from the natural world, because it was closer to organic creation than assemblage: ‘Plaster allowed Schwitters to paint and model at the same time … To build onto objects an impasto skin of plaster was not only to combine painting and sculpture, it was to graft these activities onto assemblage. He was indeed seeking in these small and unassuming plaster sculptures to draw together the different strands of his art.’ (Ibid., p.219.)
Art historian Megan Luke has posited that in his combination of paint and plaster with found objects, Schwitters was eschewing the practice of ‘truth to materials’ adopted by British sculptors inspired by organic natural forms, such as Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, as the painted surfaces of Schwitters’ sculpture estrange the viewer from the natural object that serves as the basic structure for the work, and ‘simultaneously court and deflect our impulse to seek recognition’ (Luke 2013, p.45).
Further reading
Karin Orchard and Isabel Schulz (eds.), Kurt Schwitters. Catalogue Raisonné: Volume 3, Ostfildern-Ruit 2006, no.3243.
Emma Chambers and Karin Orchard (eds.), Schwitters in Britain, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2013, reproduced p.112.
Megan Luke, ‘Togetherness in Exile’, in Emma Chambers and Karin Orchard (eds.), Schwitters in Britain, exhibition catalogue, Tate Britain, London 2013, pp.42–51.
Emma Chambers
April 2016
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