Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist born in Hanover, who lived in exile after 1937. His work spanned Dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and early installation art. He is best known for his collages, which he called "Merz Pictures."

Schwitters was the only child of Eduard and Henriette Schwitters, born at Rumannstraße No. 2 (now No. 8) in Hanover. His father co-owned a ladies' clothes shop, sold in 1898, with the proceeds used to buy rental properties that supported the family. In 1893, they moved to Waldstraße (later Waldhausenstraße), the future site of the Merzbau. Schwitters had his first epileptic seizure in 1901, a condition that exempted him from military service until late in World War I, when conscription rules loosened.

He studied art at the Dresden Academy from 1909 to 1915 alongside Otto Dix and George Grosz, though he was apparently unaware of their work or the contemporary Dresden group Die Brücke. Returning to Hanover, he began his career as a Post-Impressionist. His first exhibition was in Hanover in 1911. As World War I progressed, his work darkened, taking on an expressionist tone. He spent the last year and a half of the war as a drafter in a factory near Hanover, after being conscripted into the 73rd Hanoverian Regiment in March 1917 and exempted on medical grounds that June. He later said this factory work influenced his art, inspiring him to use machines as metaphors for human activity. He married his cousin Helma Fischer on 5 October 1915. Their first son, Gerd, died within a week of birth on 9 September 1916; their second, Ernst, was born on 16 November 1918 and remained close to his father, sharing exile in Britain.

In 1918, Germany's collapse at the war's end transformed his art. He described this as a personal revolution: everything had broken down, and new things had to be made from fragments—this was Merz. After exhibiting expressionist paintings at the Hanover Secession in February 1918, he contacted Herwarth Walden, showing two semi-abstract expressionist landscapes at Walden's Der Sturm gallery in Berlin in June 1918. That autumn, he met Berlin avant-garde figures including Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and Jean Arp. Hausmann recalled Schwitters introducing himself by saying, "I'm a painter, and I nail my pictures together." Though he continued creating expressionist and realist works into 1919 and beyond, his first abstract collages appeared in late 1918, influenced by Jean Arp. He called these works Merz after the fragment "Commerz Und Privatbank" found in his piece *Das Merzbild*, completed in winter 1918–19. By late 1919, he was well-known, following his first solo exhibition at Der Sturm in June 1919 and the publication that August of the Dadaist nonsense love poem *An Anna Blume*.

Schwitters asked to join Berlin Dada in late 1918 or early 1919, according to Hausmann's memoirs. Hausmann claimed Richard Huelsenbeck rejected him due to his ties to Der Sturm and Expressionism, which Dadaists saw as romantic and aesthetic-obsessed. Huelsenbeck mocked him as "the Caspar David Friedrich of the Dadaist Revolution," and Schwitters responded with an absurdist short story, "Franz Mullers Drahtfrühling," published in *Der Sturm* in 1922, about a bystander who starts a revolution just by being there. However, Hausmann's account is questionable, as evidence shows Schwitters and Huelsenbeck were initially on good terms. When they first met in 1919, Huelsenbeck praised Schwitters's work and promised help, while Schwitters found an outlet for Huelsenbeck's Dada publications. When Huelsenbeck visited later that year, Schwitters gave him a lithograph he kept for life, and though their friendship grew strained, Huelsenbeck wrote a conciliatory note, acknowledging their disagreements should not hinder their shared attack.