Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist. He was born in Hanover, Germany, but lived in exile from 1937.
Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called "Merz Pictures".
Early influences and the beginnings of Merz, 1887–1922
Hanover Kurt Schwitters was born on 20 June 1887 in Hanover, at Rumannstraße No.2, now No.8,Walter Selke, Christian Heppner: The birthplace of Kurt Schwitters in Hanover, in: Hannoversche Geschichtsblätter, vol. 70 (2016), pp. 66–71.Plaque at birthplace, erected by the City of Hanover in 2021. the only child of Eduard Schwitters and his wife Henriette (née Beckemeyer). His father was (co-)proprietor of a ladies' clothes shop. The business was sold in 1898, and the family used the money to buy some properties in Hanover, which they rented out, allowing the family to live off the income for the rest of Schwitters' life in Germany. In 1893, the family moved to Waldstraße (later renamed to Waldhausenstraße), future site of the Merzbau. In 1901, Schwitters suffered his first epileptic seizure, a condition that would exempt him from military service in World War I until late in the war, when conscription was loosened.
After studying art at the Dresden Academy alongside Otto Dix and George Grosz, (although Schwitters seems to have been unaware of their work, or indeed of contemporary Dresden artists Die BrückeDada, Leah Dickerman, National Gallery of Art, Washington. p. 158.), 1909–1915, Schwitters returned to Hanover and started his artistic career as a Post-Impressionist. In 1911 he took part in his first exhibition, in Hanover. As the First World War progressed his work became darker, gradually developing a distinctive expressionist tone.
Schwitters spent the last one-and-a-half years of the war working as a drafter in a factory just outside Hanover. He was conscripted into the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment in March 1917, but exempted on medical grounds in June of the same year. By his own account, his time as a draftsman influenced his later work, and inspired him to depict machines as metaphors of human activity. "In the war [at the machine factory at Wülfen] I discovered my love for the wheel and realized that machines are abstractions of the human spirit."Quoted in The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, Dietrich, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 86.
He married his cousin Helma Fischer on 5 October 1915. Their first son, Gerd, died within a week of birth, 9 September 1916; their second, Ernst, was born on 16 November 1918, and was to remain close to his father for the rest of his life, up to and including a shared exile in Britain together.
In 1918, his art was to change dramatically as a direct consequence of Germany's economic, political, and military collapse at the end of the First World War. "In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready ... Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been."The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, Dietrich, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 6–7.
Der Sturm Schwitters was to come into contact with Herwarth Walden after exhibiting expressionist paintings at the Hanover Secession in February 1918. He showed two Abstraktionen (semi-abstract expressionist landscapes) at Walden's gallery Der Sturm, in Berlin, in June 1918.Dada, Leah Dickerman, National Gallery of Art, Washington, p. 432. This resulted in meetings with members of the Berlin avant-garde, including Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and Jean Arp in the autumn of 1918. "[I remember] the night he introduced himself in the Café des Westens. "I'm a painter," he said, "and I nail my pictures together."
— Raoul Hausmann
Whilst Schwitters still created work in an expressionist style into 1919 (and would continue to paint realist pictures up to his death in 1948), his first abstract collages, influenced in particular by recent works by Jean Arp, would appear in late 1918, which Schwitters dubbed Merz after a fragment of found text from the phrase Commerz Und Privatbank (commerce and private bank) in his work Das Merzbild, completed in the winter of 1918–19.Kurt Schwitters, Center Georges Pompidou, 1994, p. 47.The Merzbild can be seen in the centre of the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, 1937, directly below the phrase 'Nehmen Sie Dada Ernst', and was presumably destroyed by the Nazis shortly afterward. By the end of 1919 he had become a well-known artist, after his first one-man exhibition at Der Sturm gallery, in June 1919, and the publication, that August, of the poem An Anna Blume (translated as 'To Anna Flower', or 'To Eve Blossom'), a dadaist, non-sensical love poem. As Schwitters's first overtures to Zurich and Berlin Dada made explicit mention of Merz pictures,Raoul Schrott, dada 15/25, Haymon Verlag, Innsbruck, 1992, pp. 225, 229. there are no grounds for the widespread claim that he invented Merz because he was rejected by Berlin Dada.
Dada and Merz
Schwitters asked to join Berlin Dada either in late 1918 or early 1919, according to the memoirs of Raoul Hausmann.Raoul Hausmann, Am Anfang war Dada, 3rd edition, ed. Karl Riha and Günter Kämpf (Giessen, 1992), p. 63. Hausmann claimed that Richard Huelsenbeck rejected the application because of Schwitters's links to Der Sturm and to Expressionism in general, which were seen by the Dadaists as hopelessly romantic and obsessed with aesthetics. note 23. Ridiculed by Huelsenbeck as 'the Caspar David Friedrich of the Dadaist Revolution',quoted in The Grove Dictionary of Art, Oxford University Press, 1996, Essay on Kurt Schwittters by Richard Humphreys. he would reply with an absurdist short story, "Franz Mullers Drahtfrühling, Ersters Kapitel: Ursachen und Beginn der grossen glorreichen Revolution in Revon", published in the magazine Der Sturm (xiii/11, 1922), which featured an innocent bystander who started a revolution "merely by being there".
Hausmann's anecdote about Schwitters asking to join Berlin Dada is, however, somewhat dubious, for there is well-documented evidence that Schwitters and Huelsenbeck were on amicable terms at first.Ralf Burmeister, 'Related Opposites. Differences in Mentality between Dada and Merz', in Kurt Schwitters: Merz – a Total Vision of the World, exhibition catalogue, Museum Tinguely, Basel 2004, 140–49. When they first met in 1919, Huelsenbeck was enthusiastic about Schwitters's work and promised his assistance, while Schwitters reciprocated by finding an outlet for Huelsenbeck's Dada publications. When Huelsenbeck visited him at the end of the year, Schwitters gave him a lithograph (which he kept all his life)Karin Orchard & Isabel Schulz (ed.) Kurt Schwitters Catalogue Raisonné 1905–22, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern, 2000, no. 575. and though their friendship was by now strained, Huelsenbeck wrote him a conciliatory note. "You know I am well-disposed towards you. I think too that certain disagreements we have both noticed in our respective opinions should not be an impediment to our attack on the common enemy, the bourgeoisie and philistinism."Ralf Burmeister, 'Related Opposites. Differences in Mentality between Dada and Merz', in Kurt Schwitters: Merz – a Total Vision of the World, exhibition catalogue, Museum Tinguely, Basel, 2004, p. 144. It was not until mid-1920 that the two men fell out, either because of the success of Schwitters's poem An Anna Blume (which Huelsenbeck considered unDadaistic) or because of quarrels about Schwitters's contribution to Dadaco, a projected Dada atlas edited by Huelsenbeck. It is unlikely that Schwitters ever considered joining Berlin Dada, however, for he was under contract to Der Sturm, which offered far better long-term opportunities than Dada's quarrelsome and erratic venture. If Schwitters contacted Dadaists at this time, it was generally because he was searching for opportunities to exhibit his work.
Though not a direct participant in Berlin Dada's activities, Schwitters employed Dadaist ideas in his work, used the word itself on the cover of An Anna Blume, and would later give Dada recitals throughout Europe on the subject with Theo van Doesburg, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, and Raoul Hausmann. In many ways his work was more in tune with Zürich Dada's championing of performance and abstract art than Berlin Dada's agit-prop approach, and indeed examples of his work were published in the last Zürich Dada publication, Der Zeltweg,Dada, Leah Dickerman, National Gallery of Art Washington, p. 167. November 1919, alongside the work of Arp and Sophie Taeuber. While his work was far less political than key figures in Berlin Dada, such as George Grosz and John Heartfield, he would remain close friends with various members, including Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, for the rest of his career.
In 1922 Theo van Doesburg organised a series of Dada performances in the Netherlands. Various members of Dada were invited to join, but declined. Eventually the programme comprised acts and performances by Theo van Doesburg, Nelly van Doesburg as Petrò Van Doesburg, Kurt Schwitters, and sometimes Vilmos Huszàr. The Dada performances took place in various cities, amongst which Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht, and The Hague. Schwitters also performed on solo evenings, one of which took place on 13 April 1923 in Drachten, Friesland. Schwitters later on visited Drachten quite frequently, staying with a local painter, . Schwitters created several collages there, probably together with Thijs Rinsema. Their collages can sometimes hardly be distinguished from each other. From 1921 onwards there are signs of correspondence between Schwitters and an intarsia worker. From this co-operation several new works originated, where the collage technique was applied to woodwork, by incorporating several kinds of wood as a means to delineate images and letters. Thijs Rinsema also used this technique.Thijs/Evert Rinsema: Eigenzinnig en Veelzijdig, Thijs Rinsema, Drachten, 2011.
Merz has been called 'Psychological Collage'. Most of the works attempt to make coherent aesthetic sense of the world around Schwitters, using fragments of found objects. These fragments often make witty allusions to current events. (Merzpicture 29a, Picture with Turning Wheel, 1920In the Beginning Was Merz, Mayer-Buser, Orchard, Hatje Cantz, p. 55. for instance, combines a series of wheels that only turn clockwise, alluding to the general drift Rightwards across Germany after the Spartacist Uprising in January that year, whilst Mai 191(9),The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, Dietrich, Cambridge, 1993, p. 111. alludes to the strikes organized by the Bavarian Workers' and Soldiers' Council.) Autobiographical elements also abound; test prints of graphic designs; bus tickets; ephemera given by friends. Later collages would feature proto-pop mass media images. (En Morn, 1947, for instance, has a print of a blonde young girl included, prefiguring the early work of Eduardo Paolozzi,In The Beginning Was Merz, Meyer-Buser, Orchard, Hatje Cantz, p. 186. whilst many works seem to have directly influenced Robert Rauschenberg, who said after seeing an exhibition of Schwitters's work at the Sidney Janis Gallery, 1959, that "I felt like he made it all just for me.")Quoted in Rauschenberg/Art and Life, Mary Lynn Kotz, Harry N Abrams, p. 91.