Kurt Schwitters Biography Quotes 2 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education

Kurt Schwitters was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1887, into a middle-class merchant family. As a teenager he sketched avidly and frequented local exhibitions, absorbing Jugendstil and the early currents of German Expressionism. He studied at the School of Applied Arts in Hanover and, after 1909, at the Royal Academy in Dresden, where he refined drawing and painting and followed debates that would soon reshape European art. During the First World War he was declared fit only for auxiliary service due to health issues and worked in non-combat roles. The experience, combined with the collapse of imperial Germany, sharpened his sense that artistic language had to be rebuilt from fragments of a shattered world.

Formulating Merz

In 1918, 1919 he began making collages from tram tickets, newspapers, wood, and cast-off packaging. Out of a bank advertisement clipped from a newspaper he isolated the syllable "merz", which he adopted as a personal brand for a broader method: the transformation of leftovers into poetic form. He published the poem "An Anna Blume", promoted by Herwarth Walden through the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin, which brought notoriety and opened doors across the avant-garde. "Merz" named not a movement with a manifesto but a lifelong practice spanning collage, assemblage, typography, sculpture, stage works, and architecture-like constructions. Schwitters insisted that harmony could be constructed from refuse, and that unity was achievable through precise formal relationships between humble materials.

Networks, Collaborations, and Dada

Though often labeled a Dadaist, he stood at an angle to Berlin Dada. Figures such as Richard Huelsenbeck and George Grosz were skeptical of his pursuit of formal balance, even as he engaged their tactics of provocation and montage. He forged productive alliances elsewhere. In Hanover he worked closely with the Kestner Gesellschaft and found an important champion in Walden. He built friendships with Hans (Jean) Arp and Theo van Doesburg, whose De Stijl program overlapped with his own interest in structure and clarity. With van Doesburg he traveled and lectured in the early 1920s, staging evenings that mixed performance, readings, and visual demonstrations. El Lissitzky, a key Constructivist, visited and exchanged ideas with him; Lissitzky's interest in Proun spaces resonated with Schwitters's emerging room-scale ambitions. He also engaged in dialogue with Raoul Hausmann and Hannah Hoch, whose photomontages offered parallel experiments with the mass-media image. These contacts ran through his journal Merz, which he edited in the 1920s, inviting contributions that mapped the international avant-garde.

Design, Poetry, and Performance

Schwitters's practice spilled into advertising, book design, and typographic experiments, where he championed asymmetry, dynamic spacing, and stark clarity. He collaborated with the artist and designer Kate Steinitz on children's books, bringing collage logic to narrative imagery. He developed sound poetry into an independent field; his multipart Ursonate, built from phonetic syllables and rhythmic structures, was shaped in dialogue with ideas circulating among Hausmann, Tristan Tzara, and Arp. On stage he mixed recitation with visual scores and cabaret timing, compressing the energies of Dada and Constructivism into a disciplined, often humorous performance language.

Merzbau and Spatial Constructions

By the mid-1920s he extended Merz into three dimensions, transforming rooms of his Hanover home on Waldhausenstrasse into the Merzbau, an evolving environment of columns, niches, and grottoes that swallowed furniture and walls alike. Friends and collaborators were inscribed into this work through dedications and sealed "gifts", turning social life into architecture. The Merzbau was not built once but continuously modified, a living diary in spatial form. Visitors such as Arp and Lissitzky saw in it a synthesis of collage and construction, while local audiences encountered an immersive, often baffling sculptural world embedded in a domestic interior.

Adversity and Adaptation in the 1930s

As political pressures mounted, Schwitters's work was singled out as degenerate by the Nazi regime. He turned increasingly to portable formats: small collages, reliefs in wood and metal, and commissioned design work that supported his family. Exhibitions dwindled in Germany even as his reputation endured abroad through networks that included van Doesburg and Lissitzky. The original Hanover Merzbau, left behind, remained a private monument to a beleaguered avant-garde ethos.

Exile: Norway and Britain

In 1937 he left Germany for Norway, where he restarted his life with a characteristic mix of resilience and experimentation. He built a new Merz construction in Lysaker and continued collage and relief work, often using materials gleaned from the terrain and shoreline. When Germany invaded Norway, he escaped to Britain in 1940 and was briefly interned on the Isle of Man with other refugees. Even there he drew portraits, made small collages, and sustained morale among fellow detainees. After release he settled in England, working in London and later in the Lake District near Ambleside. He formed a partnership with Edith Thomas, who supported his late work, and kept in touch with his wife Helma and his son Ernst as war conditions allowed.

Late Work and the Merz Barn

In the last years he translated Merz into a rural British context. He scavenged bus tickets, sweet wrappers, and driftwood, fusing them with oil paint into luminous, compact collages whose restraint belied scarcity. He conceived a final spatial work, the Merz Barn, on a farm near Elterwater. With the help of friends and visitors he developed a wall relief that condensed decades of thinking about movement, balance, and the tactile intelligence of found matter. Ill health and limited means slowed progress, but the project crystallized his commitment to building meaning from whatever materials history placed at hand.

Death and Legacy

Schwitters died in 1948 in northern England. After his death, the Hanover Merzbau was found to have been destroyed during wartime bombing, but the Merz Barn wall was preserved and later installed in a museum, securing a tangible link to his environmental ambitions. His example shaped postwar collage and assemblage, influencing artists as different as Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Beuys, and subsequent generations engaged with everyday materials. Designers and typographers, among them Jan Tschichold and others exploring the New Typography, recognized in his graphic work a decisive push toward modern clarity. Curators and scholars retraced his networks through Der Sturm, De Stijl, Constructivism, and Dada, noting how relationships with Arp, van Doesburg, Lissitzky, Hausmann, Hoch, and Walden formed a relay for ideas across borders.

Across painting, print, performance, and architecture-like environments, Schwitters maintained a consistent ethic: the world's fragments could be ordered into fresh coherence. That conviction, tested by exile and scarcity, forged an art of resilience whose wit, rigor, and humanity remain exemplary.