Schwitters, Kurt

(born June 20, 1887, Hannover, Ger.—died Jan. 8, 1948, Little Langdale, Westmorland, Eng.) German Dada artist and poet. Associated with the Berlin Dadaists from 1918, he moved back to Hannover in 1924. He assembled collages and other constructions from everyday objects (train tickets, wooden spools, newspapers, postage stamps); his poems were composites of newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, and other printed ephemera. He referred to all his artistic activities—and later to all his daily activities and even to himself—as Merz, the syllable left when he snipped letters from Kommerzbank (“Commercial Bank”). When the Nazis declared his art “degenerate” in 1937, he moved to Norway and later to England.

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