CIRCLE GAMES AMID CHAOS

This is the first of Times Art Critic William Wilson’s articles from the East Coast and Canada. Future articles: review of a Chagall retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Red Grooms’ survey at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, “The Sculpture of India” at the National Gallery in Washington and “Picasso’s Picassos” and treasures from the tomb of Ramses II being exhibited in Montreal.

An ancient, beautiful woman, looking rather like Katharine Hepburn as a bag lady, shuffled vigorously into the Museum of Modern Art’s special exhibitions gallery. The day was sticky-hot, but she wore layers of clothes and a wool hat. She gazed imperiously around the retrospective exhibition devoted to pioneer German modernist Kurt Schwitters. To her, the 200 works on view must have looked like something fashioned from stuff she’d find on trash-picking expeditions. Assemblages concocted of everything from wood scraps to chicken wire hang next to delicate collages composed of tram tickets and cigar bands.

“Who was this guy?” she inquired with a certain professional admiration. “I’ve been coming here for years, and I never heard of him.”

She caught the eye of a man lugging John Elderfield’s 424-page catalogue for the show. “Is that whole big fat book about him? Must have been important.”

Apparently satisfied, the wondrous lady departed to reclaim her own precious bundles of detritus. Schwitters would surely have liked her.

The mystique of Modernism spawned no more brilliant portmanteau idea than that of assemblage. Poet Charles Baudelaire probably started the whole thing when he celebrated the Parisian ragpicker as salvaging “everything that the big city threw away, everything it lost . . . despised . . . crushed underfoot he collects like a miser guarding treasure . . . refuse which will assume the shape of gratifying objects.”

The concept set the prototype for the outsider artist, his urban proletariat sympathies, his role as an alchemical wizard transforming base junk into poet’s gold. The idea made eccentrics into saints.

Kurt Schwitters did not invent assemblage; credit for that usually goes to Pablo Picasso. Schwitters, however, both purified and extended the practice to such depth and dimension that he may deserve historical credit as its Johnny Appleseed. This guy was going to collage everything. He even collaged a name for his collaging. He took one syllable from the German word, commerz , and called his art Merz . He was the first to compose found objects as a pure, near abstract form.

Not content with that, he used a universal magpie method to compose verbal Merz -poetry and hybrid theatrical Merz -theater. He transformed his house into a fantastic grotto of Constructivist Assemblage known as the Merzbau . Before one finishes viewing this astonishing exhibition, there is persuasive empirical evidence that Schwitters was a forerunner of such currently vital forms as word works, environmental art and performance. (A rare record of one of his readings is broadcast in the gallery. Even people who don’t understand German are mesmerized--or Merz merized--by the artist’s dramatic eloquence and musical cadences.)

By the time one has taken a third or fourth delighted turn around the galleries, Schwitters seems to have prepared the way for every artist from Joseph Cornell to Robert Motherwell and on to Jasper Johns. (“Merzpicture With Rainbow” of 1939 seems to set the format for Johns’ “According to What” and, incidentally, here is the little 1947 “For Kate,” to cue in something called Pop Art 15 years after Schwitters’ death in 1948. The Kate of the title, by the way, is surely his dear friend Kate Steinitz, who lived in Los Angeles and inspired several fine local Schwitters exhibitions.)

Having registered all these impressive historical connections, one is persuaded that they are not really what matters most in this art. Basically, its maker was about as theoretical as a jackdaw.

You really begin to get a handle on Schwitters when you realize he was an eccentric’s eccentric. As the art world codified idiosyncrasy into a new set of predictable conventions, Schwitters seemed gleefully bent on throwing them out of whack.

If the lords of artistic misrule deemed it proper to move to the big city and lead bohemian lives of cognac, coquettes and carousing, that was fine with Schwitters. But he would remain in his provincial hometown of Hanover as a bourgeois family man. When he traveled, he looked like a seedy salesman, except that his suitcases were full of gum wrappers, rags and whatever else one might need to whip out a quick collage.

Must the artist be an exquisitely sensitive, brooding loner? Kurt could relate to that. After all, his interest in art had started in boyhood after neighborhood bullies destroyed his precious little fantasy garden of roses and strawberries. The lad was so upset that he fell into an epileptic fit so severe it took two years to recover. The disease followed him into adulthood, but his reaction was to face the world as a funny, charming extrovert.

Must the artist prove his individuality by adhering to group movements, such as Dadaism? Why, the sociable Schwitters would join right up and then drive doctrinaires crazy with sane behavior. They should have known. When Schwitters was called up for World War I, he pretended terminal stupidity and bribed the examining doctor.

“To preserve myself,” he admitted blithely, “for the fatherland and the history of art by bravery behind the lines.”

Even all that cheerful subversion would, of course, amount to very little if Schwitters had not left art of such extraordinary quality.

He always marched to his own drum, even if, in the beginning, it was a drum made of a sponge. Formative work from around 1919 borrows shamelessly from other art, annexing everything from the sawtoothed mountains of Die Brucke to the cosmic vortexes of Kandinsky. Later there were enthusiastic forays into jeering Dada and the rigors of Russian Constructivism. Nothing in the work suggests Schwitters was a slavish copyist, but it is the kind of practice that tends to befuddle the clerical mentality of art historians, preventing easy recognition of a talent that lies outside stylistic categories.

Schwitters, in fact, treated the elements of other art very much the way a poet uses words or everyday situations as elements to be transformed into fresh insights in the process of their ordering and rhyming. His mature artistic voice broadcast on the rarest, most illusive and ultimately most gratifying of aesthetic wavelengths. Schwitters is heard only on the classical station. Classical here does not mean distant, rational and enshrined by mere convention. It designates an art so intrinsically complete as to defy all pigeonholes.

Truly classical art puts forth feelings that are very close to those experienced when first in love. No wonder Schwitters’ most popular work was an ebullient verbal love lyric, “Anna Blume.” Every emotion in his work is experienced simultaneously with other contradictory yet balancing emotions, like those felt by young lovers--one is at once ecstatic and terrified, starry-eyed and vaguely discontented, strong as a tiger and weak as a lamb. All that stuff that we dismiss as too corny in Expressionist pain and mannered coping with its aftermath.

Schwitters’ wholeness remained magically intact, but it is never the blithering superficiality of somebody who doesn’t know what life is all about. The artist knew tragedy in plenty.

In 1936, the rising tide of National Socialism drove Schwitters into exile, first in Norway, then in England. He left his wife behind temporarily, but she would die before they could be reunited. His beloved Merzbau was blown to bits by Allied bombs, and he must have had the feeling that without it his art would lack a central core.

Even with photographs of the structure, there is something missing in the exhibition. But it is not incomplete. It is all held together by Schwitters’ extraordinary poetic equilibrium. Work is often composed like a wheel, displaying the perfection of a circle. But it is broken by irony, balanced by grief, redeemed by unexpected joy.

Even when he was an aging refugee, poor, unknown and ailing, Schwitters’ work, if anything, took on new energy. Its historical implications once again appear crucial but once again fade against its sheer vital harmony. The guy just never lost the feeling that, after all, life is a wonder.

The exhibition continues to Oct. 1 and will then travel to London and Hanover.