A. Kurt Schwitters
Explanation:
It is difficult to portray Kurt Schwitters's work (1887-1948) without having the feeling that something important is being set aside. At the same time, exactly the attempt to encompass his entire work results in a panning movement that inevitably fails to include more detail. Such difficulty is due to two factors. Firstly, to his immense and varied production: Schwitters was poet, prose writer, playwright, critic, essayist, theorist, painter, sculptor, architect, editor, publicist, cultural agitator, etc. - and not exactly in that order. Secondly, to the fact that all these Schwitters are closely related, technically and chronologically, to each other, as are the boundaries of the various modalities of art which he exercised. It is necessary to understand his work as a set of varied productions, necessarily interconnected by a strong common denominator: his (ever changing and experimental) aesthetic conception. On the other hand, it is also important to situate it in its artistic and historical context, since one of its great merits was that it did everything it did there in the late 1920s, when the dominant art was still tied to nineteenth century moorings and concretism and pop art would still take decades to emerge.
Schwitters the Dadaists (mainly Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara and Raoul Hausmann), and participated in soirées dada in Zurich, Prague, Paris, Germany and the Netherlands. Unrestricted adherence to the Dada movement, however, does not happen. To the already mentioned influences, others would come, coming from the plastic arts, for example, from cubism; then Bauhaus artists, and later Russian constructivism. The humus from which Merz art would sprout was formed, an aesthetic created by Kurt Schwitters and which ran through his entire work.
