— Kurt Schwitters was born Herman Edward Karl Julius Schwitters, in Hannover. He attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hannover from 1908 to 1909 and from 1909 to 1914 studied at the Kunstakademie Dresden. After serving as a draftsman in the military in 1917, Schwitters experimented with Cubist and Expressionist styles. In 1918, he made his first collages and in 1919 invented the term “Merz,” which he was to apply to all his creative activities: poetry as well as collage and constructions. This year also marked the beginning of his friendships with Jean Arp and Raoul Hausmann. Schwitters’s earliest Merzbilder date from 1919, the year of his first exhibition at Der Sturm gallery, Berlin, and the first publication of his writings in the periodical Der Sturm. Schwitters showed at the Société Anonyme in New York in 1920.
With Arp, Schwitters attended the Kongress der Konstructivisten in Weimar in 1922. There Schwitters met Theo van Doesburg, whose De Stijl principles influenced his work. Schwitters’s Dada activities included his Merz-Matineen and Merz-Abende at which he presented his poetry. From 1923 to 1932, he published the magazine Merz. About 1923, the artist started to make his first Merzbau, a fantastic structure he built over a number of years; the Merzbau grew to occupy much of his Hannover studio. During this period, he also worked in typography. Schwitters was included in the exhibition Abstrakte und surrealistische Malerei und Plastik at the Kunsthaus Zürich in 1929. The artist contributed to the Parisian review Cercle et Carré in 1930. In 1932, he joined the Paris-based Abstraction-Création group and wrote for their organ of the same name. He participated in the Cubism and Abstract Art and Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism exhibitions of 1936 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
The Nazi regime banned Schwitters’s work as “degenerate art” in 1937. This year, the artist fled to Lysaker, Norway, where he constructed a second Merzbau. After the German invasion of Norway in 1940, Schwitters escaped to Great Britain, where he was interned for over a year. He settled in London following his release, but moved to Little Langdale in the Lake District in 1945. There, helped by a stipend from the Museum of Modern Art, he began work on a third Merzbau in 1947. The project was left unfinished when Schwitters died in Kendal, England.
— Schwitters studied at the Kunstakademie in Dresden (1909–1914) and served as a clerical officer and mechanical draftsman during World War I. At first his painting was naturalistic and then Impressionistic, until he came into contact with Expressionist art, particularly the art associated with Der Sturm, in 1918. He painted mystical and apocalyptic landscapes, such as Mountain Graveyard (1912), and also wrote Expressionist poetry for Der Sturm magazine.
He became associated with the Dada movement in Berlin after meeting Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and Richard Huelsenbeck, and he began to make collages that he called Merzbilder. These were made from waste materials picked up in the streets and parks of Hannover, and in them he saw the creation of a fragile new beauty out of the ruins of German culture. Similarly he began to compose his poetry from snatches of overheard conversations and randomly derived phrases from newspapers and magazines. His mock-romantic poem An Anna Blume, published in Der Sturm in August 1919, was a popular success in Germany. From this time ‘Merz’ became the name of Schwitters’s one-man movement and philosophy. The word derives from a fragment of the word Kommerz, used in an early assemblage (Merzbild, 1919; since destroyed), for which Schwitters subsequently gave a number of meanings, the most frequent being that of ‘refuse’ or ‘rejects’. In 1919 he wrote: ‘The word Merz denotes essentially the combination, for artistic purposes, of all conceivable materials, and, technically, the principle of the equal distribution of the individual materials .... A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint’; such materials were indeed incorporated in Schwitters’s large assemblages and painted collages of this period, for example Construction for Noble Ladies (1919).
Schwitters’s essential aestheticism and formalism alienated him from the political wing of German Dada led by Huelsenbeck, and he was ridiculed as ‘the Caspar David Friedrich of the Dadaist Revolution’. Although his work of this period is full of hints and allusions to contemporary political and cultural conditions, unlike the work of George Grosz or John Heartfield it was not polemical or bitterly satirical. Schwitters’s ironic response to what he saw as Huelsenbeck’s political posturing was the extraordinary absurd story Franz Mullers Drahtfrühling, Ersters Kapitel: Ursachen und Beginn der grossen glorreichen Revolution in Revon published in Der Sturm (xiii/11, 1922), in which an innocent bystander starts a revolution merely by being there. Another more macabre story, Die Zwiebel (Der Sturm, x/7, 1919), underlines Schwitters’s romantic view of the artist as sacrificial victim and spiritual leader, a notion likewise quite antipathetic to Huelsenbeck’s dialectical materialism and scorn of bourgeois categories.
— Florence Henri was a student of Schwitters.
— LINKS
— Hitler — Merz 410 — Quadrate — Santa Claus — Das Schwein niest zum Herzen — Graveyard — Difficult — Rainbow — Cross PHR — Pino Antonin — (the titles are not descriptive: they are almost all collages).
— Merzbild 5B (Picture-Red-Heart-Church) (26 Apr 1919, 83x60cm) — Merz 163, with Woman Sweating (1920) — Merz 199 (1921) — Maraak, Variation I (Merzbild) (1930) — Composition with head in left profile (1921 lithograph 25x20cm)
—
(lithograph, 19x11cm) _ not much more than what is shown here in the thumbnail,
which click for the complete picture, which includes much blank space. If
you are looking for something a little more colorful, you might click on
and 
,
and admire WEbS~8 (840x1200pix, 429kb) and WEbS~9 (840x1200pix, 481kb),
computer images, not by Schwitters of course, but, quite the opposite, by
pseudonymous artist Suldran “Turk” Sretti (not related to cyclist
Edoardo Sretti).
