Kurt Schwitters

At 60 years old, Kurt Schwitters physical status not available right now. We will update Kurt Schwitters's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Kurt Hermann Eduardus Schwitters (19 June 1887 to 8 January 1948) was a German artist born in Hanover, Germany. Schwitters worked in many fields and media, including dadaism, constructivism, survivability, music, sound, painting, sculpture, typography, and what came to be known as installation art.

Merz Pictures, his collages, are his most popular.

Merz's influence and history go back to 1887-1922.

Kurt Schwitters was born in Hanover on June 20, 1887, at Rumannstraße No. 2, now: No. 2. Eduard Schwitters and his partner Henriette (née Beckemeyer) were the only child of his mother Henriette (née Beckemeyer). His father was (co-)proprietor of a ladies' clothing store. The company was established in 1898 and the family used the money to buy some properties in Hanover, which they rented out, allowing the family to live off the family's income for the remainder of Schwitters' lives in Germany. The family lived in Waldstraße, which later became known to Waldhausenstraße, the Merzbau's future site. Schwitters' first epileptic seizure, a condition that would exclude him from military service in World War I, was diagnosed in 1901, when conscription was loosened.

Schwitters returned to Hanover after studying art with Otto Dix and George Grosz (although Schwitters may have been unaware of their existence, or indeed contemporary Dresden artists Die Brücke). In 1911, he attended his first exhibition in Hanover. His life became darker as the First World War came, he began to develop a distinct expressionist tone.

Schwitters spent the last one-and-half years of the war as a drafter in a factory just south of Hanover. In March 1917, he was drafted into the 73rd Hanover Regiment, but in June of the same year, he was dismissed on medical grounds. His time as a draftsman inspired his later work and inspired him to think of machines as metaphors of human activity, according to his own account.

On October 5, 1915, he married Helma Fischer, his cousin. Gerd's first son died within a week of birth on September 9, 1916; their second son, Ernst, was born on November 16, 1918, and he was to remain close to his father the remainder of his life, even though it included a shared exile in Britain together.

His art was to change dramatically in 1918 as a result of Germany's political, political, and military disintegration at the outbreak of the First World War.

After exhibiting expressionist paintings at the Hanover Secession in February 1918, the visitors were to come into contact with Herwarth Walden. At Walden's gallery Der Sturm, in Berlin, he held two Abstraktionen (semi-abstract expressionist landscapes). This resulted in meetings with Berliner Avant-garde members, including Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, and Jean Arp in the autumn of 1918.

Although Schwitters' work in an expressionist style continued to be produced into 1919 (and would continue to paint realistic photographs until his death in 1948), the first abstract collages, which Schwitters dubbed Merz after a piece of found text from Commerz Und Privatbank (commerce and private bank) created in his work Die Merzbild, 1918-19, will appear in late 1918, which Schwitters dubbed Merz. After his first one-man exhibition at Der Sturm gallery in June 1919, he had become well-known artist, as well as the release of An Anna Blume (translated as 'To Anna Blossom', a dadaist, non-sensical love poem). There are no reasons for the widespread belief that Merz was invented because he was rejected by Berlin Dada, as Schwitters' first visits to Zurich and Berlin Dada made explicit mention of it.

According to Raoul Hausmann's memoirs, schwitters wanted to join Berlin Dada either in late 1918 or early 1919. Richard Huelsenbeck declined the offer due to Schwitters' links to Der Sturm and Expressionism in general, which were seen by the Dadaists as both hopelessly romantic and insecure with aesthetics. He'll be portrayed by Huelsenbeck as 'the Caspar David Friedrich of the Dadaist Revolution,' and he'll reply with an absurd short story in Revon that featured an innocent bystander who started a revolution "merely for being there."

Hausmann's comment about Schwitters trying to join Berlin Dada is, however, questionable, since there is ample evidence that Schwitters and Huelsenbeck were on amicable terms at first. Huelsenbeck was excited about Schwitters' work and promised his assistance when they first met in 1919, but Schwitters responded by finding a home for Huelsenbeck's Dada books. Huelsenbeck gave him a lithograph (which he retained throughout his life) and a conciliatory note when he visited him at the end of the year, although their friendship was now strained, Huelsenbeck wrote him a conciliatory letter. "You know I am well-disposed against you." I believe that certain differences we have experienced in our respective viewpoints should not stop us from advancing against our common enemy, the bourgeoisie, and philistinism." The two men did not fall out before mid-1920, either as a result of Schwitters' poem An Anna Blume's (which Huelsenbeck dismissed as unDad) or because of disagreements about Schwitters' contribution to Dadaco, a planned Dada atlas edited by Huelsenbeck. Schwitters probably never considered joining Berlin Dada, but he was under a stipulation with Der Sturm, which offered much more long-term success than Dada's quarries and erratic venture. If Schwitters contacted Dadaists at this moment, it was likely because he was looking for ways to show his work.

Though not an active participant in Berlin Dada's life, Schwitters used Dadaist concepts in his writing and would later give Dada recitals throughout Europe on the topics of Theo van Doesburg, Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp, and Raoul Hausmann. In many ways, his work was more in tune with Zürich Dada's promotion of performance and abstract art than Berlin Dada's agit-prop strategy, and, indeed, instances of his art were published in Der Zeltweg, November 1919, alongside Arp and Sophie Tauber's work. Although his career was much less political than that of Berlin Dada's most influential figures, such as George Grosz and John Heartfield, he would remain close friends with several members, including Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann, for the remainder of his life.

In 1922, Theo van Doesburg organized a series of Dada shows in the Netherlands. Many members of Dada were invited to join but they declined. Theo van Doesburg, Nelly van Doesburg, Petr Van Doesburg, Kurt Schwitters, and occasionally Vilmos Huszár were among the acts and performances on the program. The Dada performances took place in a number of cities, including Amsterdam, Leiden, Utrecht, and The Hague. Schwitters appeared on solo evenings, one of which took place in Drachten, Friesland, on April 13, 1923. Schwitters returned to Drachten more often later on, stayed with Thijs Rinsema, a local painter. Schwitters made several collages there, most likely with Thijs Rinsema. Their collages can often be confused for each other. From 1921 to 2004, there are signs of contact between Schwitters and an intarsia worker. Several new works were created from this collaboration, where the collage technique was applied to woodwork by incorporating several types of wood as a way to distinguish images and letters. Thijs Rinsema has also used this technique.

Merz has been described as a 'Psychological Collage.' Using fragments of found objects, the majority of the works attempt to make a cohesive artistic sense of the world around Schwitters. These fragments are often compared to current events. (Merzpicture 29a, photo with Turning Wheel, 1920), among the general drift Rightwards in Germany following the Spartacist Uprising in January, 1999, the Bavarian Workers' and Soldiers' Council's strikes relate to the strikes.) Autobiographical elements abound; experimental prints of graphic layouts; bus tickets; and ephemera given by friends. Proto-pop mass media photos will be included in later collages. (En Morn, 1947), for example, has a print of a blonde young girl, diling Eduardo Paolozzi's early works, while others' works seem to have specifically inspired Robert Rauschenberg, who said after seeing an exhibition of Schwitters' works at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1959 that "I felt like he made it all for me."

Although these were typically collages of found objects, such as bus tickets, old wire, and bits of newsprint, Merz later added artists' periodicals, sculptures, sound poems, and what would later be described as "installations." Schwitters was supposed to use the term Merz for the remainder of the decade, but Isabel Schulz has reported that "the basic compositional principles of Merz remained the basis and center of [Schwitters'] creative work [[Schwitters'] contemporary output [...] Merz's "enteral principles of [Schwitters'] innovative work [G]s, the term Merz derives almost entirely from his titles after 1931."

Source