ABSTRACT
Picture a comedy sketch by Monty Python’s Flying Circus, featuring famous painters from several centuries; they are taking part in a bicycle race. Hear the ever more frenetic commentator, as he rattles off competitors’ names. In short, unfold a typical ‘Python’ mixture, in this case one which ridicules both the excessively serious tone of television art programmes, by using the style of a programme on sport, and yet also pokes fun at the banality to which programmes on sport descend. Near the end of the kerfuffle, the commentator mentions ‘our own, our very
own, Kurt Schwitters’. I was very surprised when I first saw the sketch I have asked you to imagine, for Schwitters was apparently being referred to as British. Subsequent to the ‘Python’ show I checked this fact in an encyclopaedia of art at the local library and discovered, as I should have expected from the zany ‘Python’ team, that Schwitters was actually German (though it later transpired that he had spent some time in Great Britain). From this appropriately playful and somewhat contradictory start grew my continuing fascination with Kurt Schwitters’s art and poetry.3
