Kurt Schwitters

Germany (1887—1948)

Born into a middle-class family in Hanover, Schwitters suffered from epilepsy from an early age. He was declared unfit for military service but briefly served in 1917 as a technical draftsman in a factory. In 1918 he encountered the Berlin avant-garde and met Dada artists including Raoul Hausmann. He developed his own artistic language by transforming discarded materials into art and composed the sound poem Ursonate. In 1923 he launched the magazine Merz and became close to Theo van Doesburg and El Lissitzky. In 1932 he joined the Abstraction-Création group. In 1937 he fled Nazi Germany for Norway, where he began a second Merzbau. After the German invasion of Norway in 1940, he escaped to Britain and was interned on the Isle of Man until 1941. In 1945 he moved to London and later settled in the Lake District, where he began the Merz Barn in 1947. He died in 1948 before completing the work.

Theo Van Doesburg / Raoul Hausmann / El Lissitzky (Lazar Markovich Lissitzky)

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Kurt Schwitters