About Kurt Schwitters
Born in Hanover, Germany in 1887, Kurt Schwitters had a long and varied career, working in visual art, graphic design and poetry. Schwitters was affiliated with several avant-garde movements including Der Sturm, De Stijl and Dada and his work was included in the Nazi 'Degenerate Art' exhibitions of the 1930s. Yet much of his art belongs to his own one-man movement, Merz.
Merz aimed close the gap between art and life, using found and discarded everyday materials to create a 'total work of art' or Gesamtkuntswerk. The word Merz comes from a fragment of print used in one of his collaged Merzbild or Merz pictures: part of the word Commerzbank (Commerce Bank), it reflected the ability of collage to create new meanings as things are removed from their original context. Schwitters applied the idea of collage to everything he did, including poetry and musical composition. In the case of his constructions or Merzbauten he applied it to his entire living environment.
This use of collage led to a short-lived association with Dada. Berlin Dada used collage in a highly politicised way, seeking to reflect a broken and fragmented post-World War I society. Schwitters, however, did not believe in diluting the purity of art with politics. He imagined collage as a means of bringing order out of chaos rather than the other way round. He saw his art as 'a site of transcendence that promised the harmony and structure sorely missing in Weimar Germany'.
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