In 1941, after release from internment on the Isle of Man, Schwitters moved to London until the end of the war. In 1945, partly for health reasons, he moved with his English partner Edith Thomas to live in Ambleside in the Lake District. There, largely unknown and unrecognised, he struggled to earn a living by painting portraits of local people and Lake District landscapes.
Kurt Schwitters' 60th birthday. Outside the Shippon. Edith Thomas and Bill Pierce Junior in the background.
Cylinders Farm (the Shippon) in 1948. Photo courtesy of the Pierce family.
In 1946 he met Harry Pierce, a local horticulturist and landscape gardener, whose portrait he had been invited to paint. Pierce was the owner of Cylinders, a parcel of land in Langdale which had once formed part of the Elterwater Gunpowder Works. Schwitters later negotiated with Pierce to rent a small farm shed on the Cylinders estate as his studio.
The Merz barn and Cylinders Estate – the red line marks the area of land acquired by the LITTORAL Trust in 2006.
Frustrated in his efforts to return to Hannover to recover and repair the remains of the bomb-damaged Merzbau, Schwitters considered returning to Oslo to finish work on the Lysaker Merzbau. As a German national however Norway and the Lysaker Merzbau were also closed to him. By early 1947 Schwitters had decided to begin work on a completely new Merzbau project in England.
Schwitters first expressed his idea about creating a new Merzbau In a letter written to his son Ernst written in March of that year:
‘It is no use to finish the studio in Lysaker. I will suggest starting a new Merzbau here in England or in USA. I simply have to live as long as necessary for a new Merzbau’.
With an initial $1000 award from New York1, part of a MoMA fellowship negotiated (in 1946) by Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeny, Schwitters was able to commence work on the fourth Merzbau (the Merz Barn) during the Summer of 1947. Harry Pierce repaired the shed roof and windows and Schwitters began making models of the projected interior plan and structure using stones, twigs and branches obtained locally. The four walls of the barn were later whitewashed and Edith Thomas and Pierce’s son Bill helped Schwitters prepare the basic armature and plaster for the end wall art work.
Outside the shippon at Elterwater; c.1947; l. to r. Gwyneth Davies, Wantee, Jack Cook, Schwitters, Harry Pierce, and Hilda Goldschmidt.
Interior of the Merz Barn, c. 1948
Also helping Schwitters at this point were Wantee (Edith Thomas), and a local Langdale gardener Jack Cook. Edith Thomas also worked on formal elements of the end wall, and it is thought that Harry Pierce may have made minor additions and alterations to the work after Schwitters’ death.
The Merz Barn, Cylinders, c. 1947
In a letter to his son Ernst Schwitters wrote that the Merz Barn was ‘noch weniger dadaistisch’ (even less Dadaistic) than the Lysaker Merzbau, but that it was to be the greatest of all his Merzbauten. By October 1947 he estimated that only a tenth of the work was finished and that that it would need at least two or three years to complete the barn. However, in failing health and with the onset of winter, the artist was forced to cease work in November 1947. He fell seriously ill and died in Kendal Hospital on the 8th of January 1948. The final installment of the initial $1,000 fellowship award from MoMA was used to pay for his funeral expenses.
Recently discovered letters and drawings (held at the Schwitters Archiv, Sprengel Museum, Hannover) from Schwitters to his son Ernst in 1947, contain some quite detailed early sketches and preliminary conjectural drawings for the Merz Barn. These provide very valuable new insights about what the finished Merz Barn might have looked like, and Schwitters’ thinking processes and working methods.
Sketches from a letter to Ernst (1947)
and a note book page (right) reveal Schwitters’ plans for the Merz Barn.
As the ground plan and formal structure of the Merz Barn artwork began to evolve, Schwitters introduced a number of interior diagonal wall divisions which created additional thresholds and grottos for viewing particular works of art.
Some smaller sculptures were probably designated for niches in the installation, and a curved wall just left of the entrance was to be pierced by a viewing slot, through which the Chicken and Egg sculpture was to be viewed. Above the entrance door to the barn Schwitters nailed a brightly painted wooden ’snake stick’ sculpture.
After Schwitters’ death photographic records show that the Merz Barn contained many other individual artworks, some partly unfinished, and others littering the floor. These include a collection of smaller sculptures, mainly painted slate stones and wire and plaster table sculptures which, it is believed, were produced at the same time as he was working on the Merz Barn. Some of these are on display in the Tate Britain collection, on loan from the Thomas Family.
Plan of the Merz Barn, John Elderfield
MerzBarn axonomatric plan drawing.
Artist’s impression of the finished Merz Barn (© Fred Brookes)
As Ernst Nündel suggests, the physical nature of the Merzbauten, as well as the ideas that are manifest in the projects, continue to develop and grow even today, and ‘…in the memory of those who have seen it, in the imagination of its descendants, and in the speculations of art historians. Each individual has his or her own interpretation of the Merzbau.’
MOVING THE MERZ WALL
Richard Hamilton (far left, in cap) visiting the Merz Barn, 1965 (Photo Mike McNay)
Artist Richard Hamilton, having ‘re-discovered’ the Merz Barn in the early 1960s, undertook the task of preserving the Merz Barn end wall and artwork. After failing to interest the Tate and the Arts Council in saving the work, he persuaded the University and Laing construction company to provide help, and arranged to have the wall taken to the Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University for safe keeping.
The Merz Wall being hoisted up out of the barn for removal to the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle (© Fred Brookes)
Since the barn wall was rather fragile it had to be moved all in one piece, and a metal lifting frame was welded in place around the barn end wall to allow it to be lifted out in one section. Lowered horizontally onto a pantechnicon the wall was then transported to Newcastle, on 22nd September 1965.
Related Links:
The bizarre journey of Schwitters’ Merzbarn (www.kunstgeografie.nl)
Moving the Merzbarn (www.fredbrookes.co.uk)
The Merz wall being dropped into place 1966 (© Fred Brookes)
After the work arrived in Newcastle it was stored, still in a horizontal position, in a frost-proof environment until 21st January 1966, when it was lifted into a vertical position and lowered into the Hatton Gallery through a large slot cut into the roof.
Now in the care of the Tyne and Wear Museums service, the Merz Barn wall at the Hatton Art Gallery is being promoted as one of the NE region’s international cultural treasures, and forms the centerpiece of the Great Northern Museum’s art collections. With growing interest on the part of artists, scholars and the public in re-evaluating Schwitters’ contribution to British art and architecture, it is important to find new ways of documenting and understanding the artist’s life and work.
The Merz Barn artwork in the Hatton Gallery
In this context we are hoping that the restoration of the Elterwater Merz Barn, including the reconstruction of the missing Merz Barn wall as suggested by Richard Hamilton, would help in this direction, and also provide the catalyst for the second phase of the project; the development of a Kurt Schwitters study centre and Merzbau museum.
(L-R) Dr Paul Thirkell, Derek Pullen (Tate Britian), Prof. Steve Hoskins and Adam Lowe (Factum Arte)
Plans for the restoration of the Merz Barn.
The LITTORAL Trust is also working with a team of leading architectural conservation and art restoration experts to restore the Merz Barn at Cylinder estate to near its original state (when Schwitters left it in 1947).
Decaying lintel and collapsing barn end wall.
The Trust is also in discussions with the Hatton Gallery and Tyne and Wear Museums, about the restoration of the survining Merz Barn wall art work which is located inside the Hatton Gallery. Once this work has been completed it is proposed to make a high resolution 1:1 replica of the wall and to then place this back inside the Merz Barn, in the place of the missing work.
Spadeadam, UNITED KINGDOM