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Kurt Schwitters
Hanover, 1887-Ambleside, 1948
Schwitters was one of the leading figures of the Dada movement.
He studied at the Fine Art and Technical College in Hanover and at the Dresden Art Academy. In 1918 he exhibited his first works which were Cubo-futurist in style at the Der Sturm Gallery in Berlin. In 1919 he created his first collages and assemblages made with discarded materials, which he called Merz, derived from part of the word Kommerz which had appeared in one of his collages.
Schwitters remained closed to the Zurich and Berlin Dadaists, and in 1922 through Theo van Doesburg he met the members of the Dutch group De Stijl. The influence of the geometric art produced by the Dutch artists and the strong influence of the exhibition of contemporary Russian art that he had seen at the Van Diemen Gallery in Berlin the previous autumn led Schwitters to come closer to Constructivism in his art.
Throughout his life he remained within the orbit of abstraction. In 1930 he took part in the activities of the group Cercle et Carré and in 1932 he joined Abstraction-Création.
In 1937 the pressure exerted on him by the Nazis obliged him to flee Germany and move to Norway. In 1940 he left for England and spent the last years of his life there.
GREEN, CH.: The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection. The European Avant-gardes. Art in France and Western Europe 1904-c.1945. London, 1995.
Schmalenbach, W.: Kurt Schwitters. Cologne, 1967.
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