Biographies

Kurt Schwitters (1887 – 1948) Kurt Schwitters was born Herman Edward Karl Julius Schwitters, the only child of affluent parents, in Hannover. He attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Hannover from 1908 to 1909 and from 1909 to 1914 studied at the Kunstakademie Dresden. Later, influenced by Hans Arp, he became a Dadaist, associated with the Bauhaus School at Weimar, Germany and with the “de Stijl” group in the Netherlands. He created assemblages he called “merz” from bits of urban detritus and found objects. Schwitters’s earliest Merzbilder date from 1919, the year of his first exhibition at Der Sturm gallery, Berlin, and the first publication of his writings in the periodical . Schwitters showed at the Société Anonyme in New York in 1920. He also experimented with light graphics, or cameraless imagery, and, in the 1920s he became a member of the Association of New Advertising Designers in Germany. When the Nazi’s came into power, Schwitters left Germany, spending the last years of his life in the Lake District of England. Der Sturm