Catching up - Schwitters and Estorick

I finally got around to seeting the Kurt Schwitters exhibition at Tate Britain, and visiting the Estorick

gallery of Italian art in North London  (having declared an intention to do so in my January post). Both, I'm glad to say, proved rewarding.

Kurt Schwitters was a German pioneer of collage who fled Nazi Germany, having been condemned as a "degenerate" artist, first living in Norway and then, when Norway was invaded, coming to Britain. In London, he made contact with and greatly influenced the more avant garde British artists of the time, but eventually moved to the north west and continued his collage work while also making a meagre living as a portraitist. He received notification that he had been granted British citizenship on the day of his death. The exhibition not only showcased his well-known collages, made up of things like bus tickets and adertisements, but his lesser-known three dimensional works and small sculptures, which were a surprise to me and which I actually preferred by a small margin. The influence on artists like Richard Hamilton was very clear, and complemented the recent Courtauld show on the relationship between Mondrian and Ben Nicholson. The debt to British art history from refugees from 1930s Nazism is well known, but I for one was not so familiar with the debt to refugee artists. All in all, a good story well told.

The Estorick gallery of modern Italian painting is rather out of the way in Highbury (though now easily accessble to me on the newish East London Line), and is based on the Estoricks' private collection, most famous for its Italian Futurist paintings. The permanent collection was a reminder to me that Modigliani and di Chirico were Italian (I had tended to subsume them within international modernism) and there were some very good Futurist paintings on view, but the revelation was the show of works by Giorgio Morandi, previously unknown to me but a favourite of Estorick, who visited him in his studio in the 1950s. Morandi was whatever is the diametric opposite of showy, and the publicity for his etchings and watercolours had it spot on in describing him as "the master of poetic understatement". The semi-abstract still lives and landscapes required a fairly close look, but the reward was a feeling that he had captured the essence of the objects and discarded the rest. On top of that, there was an amazing exhibition of distorted polaroid photographs of an area of Italy much represented by Morandi, produced by Nino Migliori - again, I had never heard of him, so if the Estorick is hoping to raise awareness of contemporary Italian art, it certainly succeeded with me!