Kurt Schwitters' archives and artists in captivity

Kurt Schwitters is one of the major artists of European Modernism. I mean, he’s probably better known for his work in Germany in the 1920s and the 1930s. His collages are probably the best known. His British period has been overlooked up to now. The archives that Klaus Hinrichsen has given us really give an insight into Schwitters’ life that you can’t really get from his artworks. Because Klaus was interned with Schwitters on the Isle of Man, Klaus’s papers are very important. They’re a firsthand account of his internment with Schwitters and other artists there so they’re crucial in finding out what happened in that 11, 12 month period when Schwitters and Klaus were together. Klaus felt that Schwitters deserved to be recognised for a great artist and this is why he spent a lot of time and a lot of thought on trying to make his name well-known in England. I think there were about 1500 people in the Hutchinson Camp so it was a huge camp and Schwitters and Henrichsen ended up there completely by chance together. Yes, when you look at the photographs of the internment camp, from first sight it looks like a camp, say, in Germany or on Continental Europe but looking more closely you see things which are very familiar to us, you know, bed and breakfast and hotels on the seaside front, manicured lawns, but then you notice the barbed wire and you think, well, this is a bit strange, and then there are people stood very still obviously in the morning being counted. It seems to have been a really fascinating camp because it had a particularly high concentration of artists and intellectuals who were amassed there completely by chance. Schwitters, I mean, was the hero of the camp, certainly with the artists, you know? Oh, I can't tell you how many artists there were. There were exhibitions, they had their own theatre. Oh no, Schwitters was a great entertainer, a great entertainer. Schwitters every morning was barking like a dog, barking like a dog, yes. I mean, it sounded all quite mad. Well in the beginning they had nothing and obviously if you are a creative artist, you want to create something. Schwitters collected porridge and he built a porridge sculpture in his room which attracted mice, which got mouldy, which smelled terribly, which was endangering the other floors that it would get down into the lower room. They had no artist's materials, they used the oil from when they had sardines, the tins or whatever, they used lino, they used old wood. A whole piano was taken to pieces. They were most inventive, you know? Klaus had very, very long eyebrows, and was very proud of them and as they had no paintbrushes, or if they wanted to paint something very fine, they asked him to give them some of his eyebrows. There were musicians, there were scientists, there were academics, there were artists, and they all coalesced and got together through the commandant's goodwill and created this incredible university. It's a really nice testament to what artists can still produce even if they're in captivity and the sort of atmosphere of exchange that existed in Hutchinson. It's a real shame that Klaus Henrichsen isn't here with us today. I guess in some senses it couldn't have happened without him and without his archives being here. He would be glowing with pride, walking around the galleries, I could picture him now walking around and telling me about each work as we went. It's such a shame he's not here.