Kurt Schwitters

Who was Kurt Schwitters? Here's the easy answer: he was one of the most exceptional artists of the 1920s. What was his art form? Really a bit of almost everything –painting (not very successful), poetry, literature, performance, architecture, typography and design, and above all collage and photomontage. Born on 20 June 1887 in Hannover, Germany, his whole life was all art. He died on 8 January 1948 in Ambleside, England.

What springs to mind when trying to characterize his personality is one word: 'paradox'. While challenging the world with his collages, his humorous poems and literature, his bourgeois lifestyle amazed all his friends and admirers. The way he dressed was conventional, yet he himself never was. He lived in a bourgeois house inside which he created the most amazing cubistic-constructivist architectural sphere, his so called Merzbau http://www.merzbau.org/Schwitters.html. Despite being close to the Dadaists: one of his life long friends was Jean Arp http://www.merzbau.org/Schwitters.html – he was never quite as sharp as, for example, the revolutionary Dada group in Berlin, and they never quite accepted him as one of their circle. His humour was provocative, yet its warmth and the sheer fun in his language reached the man –and woman –in the street. His poem Anna Blume http://www.soroptimist.de/anna.htm, which he himself translated into English http://www.soroptimist.de/eanna.htm, is proof of this.

He had his very own approach to art. It started with a picture created out of all sorts of scraps, which he called 'Merz picture'. In his house in Hannover in Waldhausenstrasse he collected works of art by friends and colleagues in just the same way as he collected all sorts of thrown away items that he picked up in the streets of Hannover, or on trains, buses and in public buildings. He turned them into new works of art in his famous collages. The art of hammering, gluing and sticking together his findings he called 'merzen'.

Words are really not sufficient to describe a person who was an artist through and through, never seemed to run out of ideas and created a wealth of different artefacts. Why not make use of a resource Kuwitter (as he called himself) would probably have enjoyed and transformed: the word wide web.

You can not only get a vivid visual insight on the internet – there's also an opportunity to get an aural impression of Schwitter's sound poetry by listening to Kuwitter's Ursonate: http://www.ubu.com/sound/schwitters.html.

You will find a very comprehensive site in German about Kurt Schwitters at http://www.kurt-schwitters.org/index.html. As one would expect, there are many picture of his work as well. If you don't speak any German it might be more fun to go straight to: http://collagegallery.com/schwitters_retro.htm..

If you would like to know more about Dada and Surrealism you will find an interesting article at: http://www.artic.edu/reynolds/essays/hofmann.php

And last but not least get an overview about the history of photomontage and Kuwitter's role in it by exploring this site: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/davepalmer/cutandpaste/intro.html You will find him under '1920s'. Enjoy!