Kurt Schwitters

German, 1887–1948

BiographyBorn on 20 June 1887 into a bourgeois household in Hannover, Schwitters studied at the local Kunstgewerbeschule (School for Applied Arts) and at the academies in Dresden and Berlin between 1908 and 1914. In 1915 he married Helma Fischer; their son Ernst was born in 1918. In 1917 he served briefly in the army as a clerical officer. In 1918-19 he made his first collages; became involved with the avant-garde circle of artists at the Galerie Der Sturm; met Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, and other Dadaists; and published a volume of poetry, An Anna Blume. From 1919 on, Schwitters participated in several avant-garde magazines and published his own journal, Merz (1919-31). He exhibited the Merz-pictures at Galerie Der Sturm and began his first Merzbau in his Berlin apartment in 1923 (destroyed in an air raid in 1943). In addition to his associations with Dutch Dadaists and Constructivists, he also worked as a typographer and graphic designer, and participated in the Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création exhibitions in Paris during the 1930s.

From 1931 Schwitters began spending much time in Norway, emigrating there in 1937 and painting landscapes, portraits, and still lifes to support himself. Several of his Merz pictures were included in Hitler's Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition held in Munich in 1937. When German troops entered Norway in 1939, Schwitters left for England, where in 1940-41 he was interned in displaced persons camps for seventeen months. After his release he settled in London, where he met the companion of his last years, Edith Thomas. In 1944 he suffered a stroke and subsequently moved to Ambleside in the Lake District, where he started the Merz-Barn in 1947. Despite his failing health due to a broken hip, asthma, and heart and lung problems, he continued to travel and to work, bartering his representational paintings for medical services and other necessities of life, and ekeing out a living by selling landscapes and still lifes to tourists. Still he clung to his "real" work, devoting his last energies to his collages and the organic sculpture of the Merz-Barn. On 8 January 1948 he died in Kendal and was buried in Ambleside.

Schwitters's work as a whole is characterized by rebelliousness, continuous experimentation, and a poetic and contemplative striving for order through the assemblage of the cast-off fragments of an alienated world. He did not receive major recognition until after his death.