Kurt Schwitters

German artist

Kurt Schwitters was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1887. Schwitters studied at the Hanover School for Applied Arts and the Art Academy in Dresden. In 1911 Kurt Schwitters participated in his first exhibition.

Experiments

There is scarcely an artist working today, provided they use materials other than paint, who does not refer to Kurt Schwitters in some way. In his bold and wide-ranging experiments, his prodigious collages and ground-breaking environments, he can be seen as the grandfather of pop art, happenings, concept art, Fluxus, multimedia art, and even postmodernism - yet only certain parts of his immensely varied pictorial work have been thoroughly investigated.

Merzbau

From the Dadaist collages to the final, partial incarnation of the Merzbau in the Lake District of England, Schwitters's oeuvre is here documented and properly acknowledged for the first time in a three-volume catalogue, of which this is the second installment. More than 4,000 works produced between 1905 and 1948, among them numerous previously unpublished, destroyed and lost pictures and paintings, are presented in this authoritative compendium, following worldwide research and a complete viewing of his artistic estate.
The artist's works are ordered chronologically and then according to genre, and illustrated in black and white; select representative works appear in color. This second volume covers the years from 1923 to 1936, a period in which Kurt Schwitters added steadily to his Hanover Merzbau and in which his work reflected his struggle with international constructivism. The volume ends with his 1937 flight from Germany.
ISBN 3775709886

Poems, Performance Pieces, Proses, Plays and Poetics

In 1919 the first pictures of his Merz were published, as was his poem An Anna Blume. Throughout the 20s, Kurt Schwitters devoted most of his energy to working on the Merzbau and Merz magazine, and also founded a successful advertising agency in 1924. Upon the Nazi defamation of his work in 1937, he emigrated to Norway, later continuing on to England, where Kurt Schwitters died in 1948. Five years earlier, an air raid over his home in Hanover had destroyed the original Merzbau.
ISBN: 1878972359