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Biography
Kurt Schwitters (Hannover, Germany 1887 – Kendal, UK 1948)
Kurt Schwitters completed his art studies at the academies in Hanover (1908) and Dresden (1909 to 1914). While he was still painting in an academic manner at this time, he turned to expressionist stylistic devices in 1917 and began with abstract compositions. In the same year, he was drafted into military service in the First World War, but was discharged a few months later due to his poor health.
Kurt Schwitters tried to create a new art form in a metaphorical sense from the ruins and remnants of the First War. This resulted in MERZ painting. The prefix MERZ is a random fragment from an advertisement of the COMMERZ UND PRIVATBANK, which Schwitters inserted into one of his paintings and with which he henceforth designated his art.
Materials of all kinds, collected, mounted or glued to or into the picture - these are assemblages and collages, and they have made Kurt Schwitters known to a wide audience. Schwitters himself did not use the terms collage and assemblage; he spoke of "MERZ pictures". This medium became the basic principle of his art, because it offered almost ideal opportunities to realize the most important goal of his "Merzkunst": the linking of the relationships between heterogeneous fragments of "all conceivable materials".
Schwitters received important impulses from van Doesburg and Moholy-Nagy, through whom he occupied himself with constructivism until 1926. From 1923 he published the magazine "Merz" (until 1931). He was also a co-founder of the groups "rings neuer werbegestalter" and "die abstrakten hannover" (both 1927) and a member of the Parisian associations "Cercle et Carré" (1929) and "Abstraction - Création" (1931). In the mid-1930s, he also achieved his international breakthrough.
With the seizure of power by the National Socialists, his numerous activities ended abruptly. In 1937 he withdrew to Norway, and in 1940 he fled from there to England, where he lived under the most difficult conditions until his death. The works of the 1940s are permeated by the melancholy of being an emigrant. In exile, he fought for the appreciation of his art, which unfortunately was not given to him. Critics celebrated his works, but he was no longer able to build on the great successes in Germany. Schwitters died in 1948 in northern England.
Today, Schwitters is considered an outstanding pioneer of avant-garde art, a central figure of Dadaism. His works are represented in Sprengel Museum Hannover, Centre Pompidou Paris, Tate Britain London and Museum of Modern Art New York, among others.
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Works