Kurt Schwitters
(b Hannover, 20 June 1887; d Kendal, Westmorland,
England, 8 Jan 1948).
German painter, sculptor, designer and writer. He
studied at the Kunstakademie in Dresden (1909–14) and served as a clerical
officer and mechanical draughtsman 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; New York, Guggenheim), 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), 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; Los Angeles, CA, Co. Mus. A.). 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 (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.
