Emissaries of the Land
Conversations between
John Ruskin | Kurt Schwitters | Derek Hyatt
Emissaries of The Land
13th November – 2nd March 2025
Emissaries of the Land is an exhibition of works by Kurt Schwitters (1887 – 1948) and Derek Hyatt (1931 – 2015), curated by Michael Richardson and first exhibited at Art Space Gallery, London in 2023. The ‘conversation’ between these two artists takes an unexpected twist, as it now comes to the former home of John Ruskin, who joins the meeting.
Schwitters occupies a secure place in the history of the early 20th Century avant garde. His collages created from discarded everyday scraps of life on the streets of Hanover in the inter-war years, his links to DADA and his own concept of Merz, placed him high on the Nazi list of so-called ‘degenerate’ art. His subsequent flight to safety through Norway and Britain, later enshrined him as a heroic refugee of an earlier era, somehow inexplicably marooned in the provincial backwaters of wartime Ambleside.
Schwitters’ later career took him into places where a predominantly urban-minded art world found – and still finds –it hard to follow. He went to nature. In Ambleside Schwitters created a series of exquisite abstract painted constructions which draw from the landscapes around him. It took a young Derek Hyatt to see this. As a student at the Royal College of Art he reviewed a Schwitters’ show ten years after the latter’s death. Hyatt drew the comparison between Schwitters and English landscape artist, Paul Nash. The Schwitters show was an inspiration for Hyatt, who went on to become a uniquely individual interpreter of landscape, in particular the north Yorkshire Moors.
The exhibition at Brantwood allows Hyatt and Schwitters to come together physically. The chemistry is powerful. Each makes the other more telling. Hyatt releases Schwitters from his historical straitjacket. The seldom seen works on show can be experienced in an entirely different context. Schwitters reveals the playful Hyatt as an artist of genuine strength, a sensitive, almost mystical, painter, above all a true master of colour. The exhibition takes place in the home of a third, well acknowledged, artist of landscape, John Ruskin. The sharp detail of Ruskin’s own work as an artist often veils its deeper sensitivity and thoughtful abstraction. With his two house guests alongside him, Ruskin thus connects directly with the generations who have taken him forward in radical ways, giving Hyatt and Schwitters fresh presence, and drawing from them a similar power.
Perpetual Variation
In his essay, “A Thicket in Llyn”[i], the poet R.S. Thomas vividly describes coming upon an isolated clump of bare trees, approaching it so quietly that his presence had gone unnoticed. Stepping inside, he had, “the one mystical experience of his life”:
“It was alive with goldcrests,” he writes. “The air purred with their small wings. To look up was to see the twigs re-leafed with their small bodies. Everywhere their needle-sharp cries stitched at the silence. Was I invisible? Their seed-bright eyes regarded me from three feet off. Had I put forth an arm, they might have perched on it. I became a tree, part of that bare spinney where silently the light was splintered, and for a timeless moment the birds thronged me, filigreeing me with shadow, moving to an immemorial rhythm on their way south.
Then suddenly they were gone, leaving other realities to return: the rustle of the making tide, the tick of the moisture, the blinking of the pool’s eye as the air flicked it, and lastly myself. Where had I been? Who was I? What did it all mean? When it was happening, I was not. Now that the birds had gone, here I was once again…”
I think this beautifully encapsulates the core paradoxical concerns explored in the works of Ruskin, his hero Turner, and in their different ways, of Schwitters and Hyatt. Thomas’s record of his encounter with nature typifies the conflicts between our claims to be a tiny part of a greater whole, while nature continually demonstrates, in what Ruskin calls its “perpetual variation”, that it is beyond our control.
His breath-taking line, ‘When it was happening, I was not’, perfectly nails the dilemma we face in trying to reconcile the dichotomy between the illusion that our ownership and control of nature equates to our belief that we are a part of it. The relation between what Thomas sees and what he knows is never resolved.
Following the Romantics, art’s attempts to bridge the separation between the human and the natural world became a matter of finding an equivalent, not for mere likeness, but for the invisible forces of nature, her processes. So too for Schwitters and Hyatt.
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Schwitters, the polymath, was one of the most influential artists of the 20th century. Everyone who has made assemblages, from Joseph Cornell, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Beuys to Doris Salcedo, Cornelia Parker, Olafur Eliason and Ai Wei Wei, is in some way indebted to him.
Defying categorisation, Schwitters produced paintings, assemblages, sculptures, innovative graphic design and typography, and performances, He also composed primal phonetic poems that still startle, and worked on three sprawling, immersive environments, the Merzbaus. His first, in Hanover, was the first great work of its kind, integrating assemblage, painting and architecture. Its convolutions reached through two floors and four rooms of his home, with an outgrowth in the attic. The art critic, Robert Hughes, wrote, “It was as if he had deposited the cells and memories of his own brain, wrought out in a coral of bizarre objects, cabinets and boxes, on the walls of a maze.” And described it as probably “the most fabulously complex plastic work of the 20th century, a sculptural Finnegans Wake … a nautilus containing memory jammed next to memory in its chambered, outward-growing grottoes…” Demonstrating that art could made out of anything, for anywhere, and serve any purpose, it is in the DNA of all experiments in mixed media since the 1950s.
While studying at the Royal College of Art, in a conversation with my father about the kind of art that interested me, I mentioned the work of my hero, the Hanoverian Schwitters. Dad, who had served in the RAF as a rear gunner flying Lancaster bombers during the war, then shockingly revealed the bleakly ironic fact that he had flown on the October 1943 raids on Hanover that had atomised Schwitters’ house, and with it his masterpiece.
In the latter half of the nineteenth century Charles Baudelaire declared: “modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent.” The Romantic Movement’s most significant and far-reaching bequest to the arts has been our understanding of life as “consciousness”, and reality as being both fragmented and yet unified. Its self-reflexive aesthetics, drawing energy from the collision of disparate conceptual and perceptual elements leading to revitalisation, made it the benign midwife of collage, probably the most important idea of the 20th century.
While Schwitters did not invent collage as a medium, in his hands he became its master. It is these he is best known for and it is largely due to him that collage, as practice and concept, is the most important cultural idea of the 20th century, profoundly influencing all subsequent waves of modern experimental artistic and literary movements since the 1950s, and suffusing every area of our cultural and media landscape. Painting, sculpture, installation, performance, drama, dance, literature, TV, radio, comedy, graphic design, advertising, film, music, have all tapped into collage’s possibilities for compositional fragmentation and associative suggestion, and today, with the computer, the ultimate collage tool, previously unimagined sound worlds, tangential narratives of computer games and multiple connections discovered in hyperspace, are revealed: all of these developments are impossible to contemplate without collage as a paradigm.
Throughout his life Schwitters rummaged through rubbish bins and gutters plucking out society’s discarded and unwanted, the way an archaeologist might pick over a buried midden heap, on the sound theory that a culture reveals itself in what it throws away. Tram tickets, wisps of cotton wool, stained glass-like sweet wrappers, burlap, fag packets, feathers, photos, gauze, wheels, snatches from headlines and posters, glass, a neatly bulls-eyed target, a scrap of a food ration book. In his diaristic works, these became poignant emblems of his changing times.
The idea of the urban poet as scavenger had been around since Baudelaire’s ragpicker in the 1860s.
In 1882 Van Gogh praised the Hague’s city dump as “a real paradise for the artist.” Even Turner liked litter. Ruskin writes of him, “bringing the dingy oddments of life into his work … smoke, soot, dust and dusty texture; old sides of boots, weedy roadside vegetation, dunghills, straw-yards and the spillings and strains of every common labour… he delights in shingle, debris and heaps of fallen stone … bodies and jetsam in seas.”
Schwitters’ choice of the found was not made as a pessimistic response to the senseless carnage of the First World War, but rather as a celebration. “The whole swindle that men call war was finished.” … He wrote, “I felt myself freed and had to shout my jubilation out to the world… Everything had broken down in any case, and new things had to be made out of fragments.”
Fragments and ingenuity …
Ruskin advised artists to reject nothing. Turner blew pigments across his canvases, kept one thumbnail sharp for incising his paint, and used his own spit and tobacco juice to create washes. In Scotland, he captured the effects of a threatening storm with peat bog water. In addition to brushes, Hyatt’s armoury included his hands, fingers, rags and palette knife to stroke and drag paint, sticks to inscribe. … Schwitters used everything.
“Give me some mud off a city crossing, …” Ruskin wrote, “… some ochre out of a gravel pit, a whitening, and some coal-dust, and I will paint you a luminous picture …”
Like Ruskin, who he had studied at art schools in Hanover and Dresden, Schwitters was also a brilliant colourist. His collages echo Ruskin’s claim that: “No colour harmony is of high order unless it involves indescribable tints … even among simple hues the most valuable are those which cannot be defined …” Their jewel-like beauty were achieved through the careful selection of scraps of fugitive hues to create grounds of subtle colours, juxtaposed or overlapping like leaves on a forest floor, their modulations like musical sequences, against which he placed accentuating patches of sonorous scarlets, blues or greens.
Ruskin again: “Nature is just as economical of her fine colours … she will only give you a single pure touch, just where the petal turns into light; but down in the bell all is subdued, and under the petal all is subdued, even in the showiest flower.”
While essentially an urban artist, Schwitters, revered nature, painting abstract and naturalistic landscapes throughout his life. His conception of nature was first announced in his 1924 Merz publication: “Nature, from the Latin Nasci, i.e. To become or come into being. Everything that through its own force develops, forms or moves. Every form is the frozen instantaneous picture of a process. Thus the work of art is a stopping point on the road of becoming and not the fixed goal.”
Schwitters’ later curvilinear, biomorphic, painted reliefs, inspired by his Lakeland surroundings, were a continuation of a style which he and the likes of Kandinsky, Arp and Miro had been experimenting with since the 1920s, also evident in the earliest works of Pollock, Rothko, Moore and Hepworth.
Characterized by an acute awareness of placement, in which the materials become essential active carriers of meaning, triggers for our responses, their natural significance reveals his environment, their coarseness mirroring natural evolution, the effects of the elements.
On one level they are landscapes, on another, quotations from the world, lifted like turf, and reanimated. It was from these confounding inter-weavings of romantic and impressionistic visualizations of earth, air and water, that the Elterwater Merzbarn relief itself emerged.
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For Hyatt, the landscape of the Yorkshire Dales, with its defining stone walls and enclosures, was his crucible of creativity. Here he sensed the presence of its earlier occupants, who with antler tips and stones, inscribed still mysterious rings, spirals, grooves and gouged cups into the rocks; here he strived to tap into ancient relationships, to conjure visionary jigsaws of lyrical impressions and observations.
He claimed not to have a style, only a subject: the landscape of north Yorkshire. In 2001 he said, “I have always found the moors to be full of shifting colours and unexpected feelings. Once through the stile in the wall and onto the open moor I am instantly into the world of imagination.”
In his paintings, the moorland, haunted by its restless history, appears in palimpsests of its forgotten or invisible features, leaving traces, hints for the subconscious.
A film of Hyatt with his Meetings on the Moor paintings at the Artspace Gallery in 2012, shows him entranced as he recalls his experiences of painting. While talking, his mind he is painting again. His eyes and thoughts pinballing from the fleeting present to the deep past, his see-feeling fingers, retracing his original searchings.
Revelling in the juxtapositions of opposites drawn from perception, memory and imagination, out of which he shapes unity, his mind darts or drifts from the seemingly mundane to the magical:
“I am at the mercy of what happens”, he says as he gazes over scrubbed fellsides, smudged vistas of sky and downy clouds gusting over nervous scribbles of fret. “Things are worn away.” His palms linger above the fleeting effects of glazes activating the minutest inflections from urgent scrapings and contours.
Thoughts within thoughts collide and collude, then snap back to the immediate: “It was the day of the Red Bull; the day of the Snowstorm; the day of the multiple rainbows … I’d seen two shapes circling round the cross and realised there were two short eared owls doing their mating display round each other. Round each other. And I thought: ‘I’ll never see that again. What a marvellous event and I think the best thing to do to remember it is to mime it with my hands. To play it out… The owl. The nest. The egg. The bird. The entrance …” Solidity dissolves into transparency. Forms into feelings. Symbols into reality. Myth into the now.
“It began to rain and I sheltered under an overhanging rock … a wire came down from the rock and there was a big raindrop hanging on the wire, glistening like a jewel. That was the centre of the universe. That was special and unexpected. …What a moment … The landscape enters our bodies … we dance its life.” The known becomes the astonishing.
For an instance, seeing through his eyes, you are with him back in a moment of creation, caught by the same boundless curiosity for Ruskin’s ‘perpetual variation’ that he shared with Schwitters.
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Schwitters and Hyatt are heirs of that great legacy encompassing Wordsworth, Blake, Turner, Ruskin, Palmer and Nash, who all strove to reconcile the potential of a semi-abstract language, freed from time and place, with the desire to also reveal the mysterious treasures of the natural world. They understood that nature is not a static pattern of separate elements, but a forcefield of dynamic interconnections in ceaseless flux, and that the beauty and truth of a painting is proved in its ability to convey Ruskin’s “perpetual variation.”
Their prescient experiments with paint and the found object, the use of the vernacular and the unadorned, where associative thinking supplants linear formation, represents a radical exploration of the innate value of the natural environment. In this there is a parallel with our current understanding of, and conflicting responses towards, not just modernity, but also our sense of place, history, memory, questions of national identity and notions of ‘otherness’. They encourage us to pay closer attention to our own more immediate environment, to know it with new eyes, to celebrate and cherish it, and to trust in the wondrous inherent in the commonplace.
Art, in all its myriad forms, can enable us to view and think about the world and our place in it differently. It can make us feel and understand it with a lucidity sometimes lost in the deluge of information, mis-information and dis-information, that bombards us daily. It can inspire a sense of wonder and connection with nature that is full of hope. In these increasingly uncertain times, hope, as revealed to Patrick Kavanagh as “a star-lovely art / In a dark sod”[ii], is something we need to find much more of.
Russell Mills
Ambleside
14th November 2024
[i] Included in Britain: A World by Itself (London: Aurum Press, 1984)
[ii] Quinn, Antoinette (ed), Patrick Kavanagh: Collected Poems (London: Penguin Classics, Allen Lane, 2004)
EMISSARIES OF THE LAND AT BRANTWOOD
by
Howard Hull, Director of Brantwood
Derek Hyatt (1931-2015) was a Yorkshire-based artist who loved to imagine encounters which resulted in painterly conversations; but for him they were not imaginary. Derek saw art as a meeting place where the exchange between two or more souls could take place without the barriers of time. It was a simple step for him to articulate a dialogue with another artist regardless of when or where they lived. Their mortality was of no concern to him because the conversation was timeless.
Artists have always operated within a continuum of influences. Until I met Derek, I had tended to see this as a one-way relay – a passing on to the next generation of a flame kindled by an earlier one. Derek’s approach defied such linearity. For him, walking across the North Yorkshire moors, time seemed to move equally in all directions and the owl would fly from its encounter with him into a place that was still living in a time of pre-history. And then it would fly back. Derek’s response was shamanic, possessed. The hieroglyphic nature of his wandering lines, which overlay each other in their storytelling, are something of a gift from another world. The supercharged colours, infringing on their neighbours, are radiant, spirit-embodying.
For such a spiritually sensitive response to landscape it was remarkable that Derek was so articulate. He loved to talk about his work and to share his secrets. He was a generous teacher and his desire to converse was so great that the texts of his letters with their sketches and their clippings would spill over onto the outside of his envelopes. He couldn’t stop himself.
It should not, therefore, have been difficult to give Derek the sort of show that he deserved at Brantwood, but I have always felt that something was missing in the simple show of his work that we gave him in 2003. Derek loved Ruskin. He was a Companion of Ruskin’s Guild of St George. He befriended Brantwood, where he taught classes. He imagined – and scripted –meetings between Paul Klee and Ruskin. Ruskin’s dictums ‘to see clearly’ and to ‘go to nature’ were cornerstones of his own artistic life. And yet, something in his 2003 show at Brantwood was missing.
I’m not really sure what inspired Michael Richardson to put Kurt Schwitters and Derek Hyatt together, but the moment I saw Emissaries of the Land, I knew the missing ingredient was this conversation. The pairing was perfect because, like all great conversations, it worked through exchange in both directions. Kurt Schwitters’ late work in the Lake District was similarly difficult to exhibit, too isolated, missing connection to kindred spirits.
Kurt Schwitters (1887 – 1948), of course, already occupied a secure place in the history of the early 20th Century avant garde. His collages created from discarded everyday scraps of life on the streets of Hanover in the inter-war years, his links to DADA and his own concept of Merz, placed him high on the Nazi list of so-called ‘degenerate’ art. His subsequent flight to safety through Norway and the Isle of Man, later defined him as a heroic refugee from a different era, somehow inexplicably marooned in the provincial backwaters of wartime Ambleside.
Schwitters’ later career took him into places where our predominantly urban-minded art scene found – and still finds – it hard to follow. He went to nature. In Ambleside Schwitters created a series of exquisite abstract painted constructions which draw from the landscapes around him. It took a young Derek Hyatt to first understand them. As a student at the Royal College of Art, Hyatt was editor of ARK, the College journal. In ARK 23 he reviewed an exhibition of Schwitters’ work at the Lords Gallery in London, ten years after Schwitters’ death. Hyatt drew the comparison between Schwitters and English landscape artist, Paul Nash. Finding this connection to the soul of landscape was an inspiration for Hyatt. He sums his review with a line of words laid out like his own wandering path across the moors, ‘Constructions Interpenetrations Depth Progression Time Death Flight Journey Paradise’.
The current exhibition at Brantwood allows Hyatt and Schwitters to come together physically. The chemistry is powerful. Each makes the other more telling. Hyatt releases Schwitters from his historical strait jacket. He is both prehistoric and in the moment, creator of a set of verbs to which we bring our own nouns. Schwitters reveals the playful Hyatt as an artist of genuine strength, a sensitive, almost mystical, painter, above all a true master of colour.
The exhibition takes place in the home of a third, well acknowledged artist-theorist of landscape painting and champion of Turner, John Ruskin (1819-1900). The sharp detail of Ruskin’s own work as an artist often veils its deeper sensitivity and thoughtful abstraction.This marriage of truth to nature through clear-sightedness, coupled with an embracing sensitivity to motive life force, gave rise to Ruskin’s term ‘heartsight’, something which he applies to Turner, but which could equally well be spoken of Hyatt and Schwitters. In his five-volume masterpiece on landscape painting, Modern Painters, Ruskin deconstructed the language of art and re-configured its relationship to nature. Ruskin painted throughout his life using art, Schwitters-like, to scavenge nature and culture alike. Ruskin’s landscapes proceed from element to element, assemblies of details overlaying each other as in the perceptions accrued in a journey. The intimacy of Ruskin’s approach builds an emotional connection with his audience, but we have to enter his world. Ruskin, like Hyatt and Schwitters, is difficult to exhibit. Almost none of his work was designed for professional exhibition, but all of it was made with conversation in mind. In his writings, Ruskin may have spoken to a world-wide audience, but he always spoke as an artist speaking to fellow artists.
With his two house guests alongside him, Ruskin thus connects timelessly with freinds who have taken his perceptions forward in radical ways, giving Hyatt and Schwitters fresh presence, and drawing from them a similar power.
