Kurt Schwitters
A Hanoverian artist who built his entire practice around discarded materials — ticket stubs, wire, newspaper, wood — and called it all Merz, a word he invented as a fragment he had found.
Kurt Schwitters invented a private movement — Merz — and spent his career building it out of what other people threw away. Ticket stubs, wire mesh, newspaper fragments, bottle caps, lumps of wood: assembled into collages, reliefs, and eventually entire rooms, they became a body of work that sits between Dada and Constructivism, owes allegiance to neither, and stands as one of the most original achievements in twentieth-century art. He died in the English Lake District, three years into exile, still building a third Merzbau.
Hanover and the invention of Merz
Schwitters was born in Hanover in 1887 and studied at the Dresden Academy. He returned to Hanover, where he spent most of his pre-exile working life. Rejected by Berlin Dada — Richard Huelsenbeck refused his membership on aesthetic grounds — he responded by founding his own one-man movement: Merz.
The name came from a fragment he had cut from a newspaper advertisement for the Kommerz- und Privatbank; the syllable stuck because it meant nothing and could mean anything. He applied it to everything he made: Merz paintings, Merz poetry (the sound poem Ursonate is his most famous), Merz performances, and eventually the Merzbau.
The Merzbau
Beginning around 1923, Schwitters began constructing a sculptural environment in his Hanover house — an accumulation of columns, caves, grottoes, and niches filled with found objects and personal relics. The work grew to fill multiple rooms and two floors and is known as the Hannover Merzbau. It was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1943.
He subsequently built a second Merzbau in Norway (1937–40, lost to fire in 1951) and began a third in Elterwater, Cumbria — now known as the Merz Barn — which he was still working on when he died in 1948. The surviving wall is in the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle.
Exile and the English years
In 1937 Schwitters was classified as a degenerate artist by the Nazi regime; his work was included in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition. He fled to Norway with his son, then fled again to Britain when Germany invaded Norway in 1940. Interned briefly on the Isle of Man, he was released and spent his final years in the Lake District, where the Merz Barn was built.
He died in Kendal, aged sixty, one day after receiving British citizenship and the day after obtaining a grant from the Museum of Modern Art in New York that would have funded further work.
Everything had broken down in any case and new things had to be made out of the fragments.
Legacy
Schwitters's collage method — recombining the overlooked detritus of everyday life into autonomous aesthetic objects — became a central precedent for postwar assemblage, Arte Povera, and the wider field of found-object art. Robert Rauschenberg's "Combines" are among the most direct descendants.
