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 wa
I found little in my research about Kurt Schwitters early life. He was born in 1887. Once grown, he became a veritable “renaissance man” of the 1900s. He was all at once an artist, graphic designere, typographer, set designer, and an acclaimed poet. He was a leader of the Dadaist movement in Germany. He moved to Hannover in 1919 (right after dada had “transplated” in Berlin) and started his own form which he called Merz. Some historians claim that this was after ComMERZ Banks. Wherever it came from, Schwitters started publishing his works and other dadaist’s works in his magazine aptly called “Merz”. This publication ran from 1923-1932. This is the history of Kurt Schwitters. He was the most influencial dadaist in his time and continues to be so, in the modern dadaist philosophy. (Yes, dada is still around).
