Schwitters Kurt

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) Excluded from the movement Hobby-horse Berlin, it reacts by melting Dada Hanover. This movement was founded on the apolitical one (thus with the antipodes of the designs of Berlin Hobby-horse, which was a politically engaged movement), the fantastic one and constructivism. Its principal pillars are the Merz review, and the art of the same name.

Merz is a reduction of the word Kommerz which we were able to read on a collage of year 1919. The word arose organically from the merzage of the picture(board), not accidentally, because in the artistic development nothing is accidental, what is logical. J named formerly this picture, according to its legible part, picture Merz. When looking for a generic name for my art, j understood that I created except the usual generic notions, I l named according to the most characteristic picture, the picture Merz. The notion Merz was untranslatable and thus susceptible to evolve in the management given by the picture Merz. By a logical overbid, I gave to the notion of Merz its current meaning and offered it to the community by means of the magazine Merz.
Merz write 1923

The process on which this art is founded is at the same time a major process of all the literary Hobby-horse as much as plastic: it is about joining. One found on his fabrics of the tickets of bus, the scraps of posters or newspapers, of the rags, the buttons, the pieces of fabrics, the stoppers, etc which constituted “harmonious” tables. Merz is besides the fragment of a paper where was writes the German word Kommerz, of Kommerz Bank. (Merz perhaps also translated into French by “trick”, “thing”, which characterizes these assemblies of various elements indeed…) L studied the painting of 1909 to 1914 with the Academy of Dresden. It took part in the review der Sturm of Berlin. Large friend of Hausmann and Arp, it founded a movement parallel with the Hobby-horse which it named Merz. From 1930 to 1948, it took refuge in Norway to flee the Nazism. It was pointed out by drawings with the pencil, the charcoal, the watercolour then joinings and assemblies since 1919. Refused to the Hobby-horse of Berlin by Huelsenbeck, it reacts and creates its Merzbild table in 1919. The word Merz being cut out since Kommerz in a printed advertisement. In 1923, it creates its work in Hanover, Merzbau, a whole of timber structures and plaster with cavities where is embedded its work and those of his/her friends. Destroyed in 1943, it partially rebuilt by Switzerland Harald Szeemann. After 1923, it binds with the constructivists Theo van Doesburg and Russian El Lissitsky. It carried out with them the Merz review appeared between 1923 and 1932. A power station of Merz publicity was creates and it launched the new advertisement for firms like Pelikan, Opel or Bahlsen. After the German invasion of Norway, it resided in 1946 at Ambleside in Westmoreland in England. In February 1995, the Beaubourg Center in Paris organized a Schwitters exposure. It published Anna Blume in 1919 and Ursonate in 1932.

When Schwitters died to Wesmoreland he was far from suspecting that one day he would contribute to make the fortune of the industrialists of the glue in the world. Hundreds of thousands of collagistes applied more or less talented, make collages conscientiously shown during hundreds of exhibitions(exposures) today which are applauded, analyzed and bought, with the aim of achieving a world célbrité. Schwitters was not able to attend his world success, he would have appreciated a lot.