Kurt Schwitters

“Our camp is large: several streets, a large square with many flowers, and many interesting people. I attend lectures on philosophy and art, and concerts, and I paint many interesting heads. I still have paints, and the wife of a sculptor here, with whom I am friends, has sent me materials from London.”

In August 1940, Kurt Schwitters wrote these lines in a letter from Hutchinson Internment Camp in Douglas, on the Isle of Man. Following the invasion of Norway by the National Socialists, Kurt and Ernst Schwitters fled to England in the spring of that year. As German nationals, they were classified there as enemy aliens and interned together with hundreds of others – most of them Austrian and German citizens. 

One of the internees was the German economist Alfred Sohn-Rethel. He had fled Germany in 1936, travelling via France to England. Because of his communist convictions and his contacts with left-wing socialist resistance groups, he feared arrest. Schwitters painted Sohn-Rethel in restrained, sombre earth tones. His complexion barely stands out from the colour of the wall in the background. The artist portrayed Sohn-Rethel seated on the floor with his knees drawn up. Smoking a pipe, he looks directly at us. With one hand, clenched into a fist, he holds his pipe. The disproportionately large hand obscures part of his face – as if he were shielding himself.

Highly sociable by nature, Schwitters cultivated contact with many of the internees. He drew and painted them, and in some cases was even able to sell portraits. In a letter to his wife, Schwitters mentioned that his art was experiencing an “unforeseen surge” and that he believed he would “soon become a famous portrait painter”.