Kurt Schwitters Essay

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Kurt Schwitters The most common art movement that Kurt Schwitters was associated with Dada, but he also had some influences on Constructivism, Surrealism and Expressionism. He utilized a bunch of mediums for artworks, collages and he even wrote some poems. He considered himself as Merz. Merz was a term that Schwitters often used in his work, describing it as "In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready.... Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been." (http://www.designishistory.com ). Kurt Schwitters had gone through Kurt Schwitters was born June 20, 1887. Schwitters was an only child, who traveled around a bunch with his father. In the beginning of his life, he had quite a good childhood, besides when he started to have epileptic fits. At age 14, he had his first epileptic fit, which was the start of the recurring condition. He felt continually impacted how he related to the world. Kurt Schwitters was a German Painter, Collagist, and writer. Schwitters went to study art and drawing at Dresden Academy. On October 5, 1915, Kurt married his cousin, Helma Fisher, which had one son who died after birth. The couple had a second child, Ernst, in 1918. Kurt was really close to his son. Ernst spent much of his time with his father before he went to school. He used Schwitter’s studio for making his own drawing and college. He His medium for his collages was a little bit of everything. His artwork prompted different reactions from the people around him. In Modern Art by Taschen Bibliotheca Universalis it states “Schwitters himself reacted to his rejection by the Berlin Dadaists in general and to Huelsenbeck’s attacks in particular with a self-assured polemic of his own” (Modern Arts, 273). Merzbau was one of the artworks that lack order. The artwork was a walk in collage which was constructed of grottoes, columns and found object.The college had a total of eight rooms. The pictures that were taken of the Merzbau was in the ‘Merzbau proper’ or also know as the ‘eigentlicher Merzbau’. In the ‘eigentlicher Merzbau’ was where Kurt Schwitters had began to work on in 1927. He always found something to shift or to add to it so it was always expanding and shifting. This cool college was also used for his studio. I thought it was really creative using items which he found on the streets since of the economy. The lack of order in his artwork made his artwork original compared to other artist. Since the Merzbau wasn’t finished it makes me wonder what it would have been like once it was finished or if he would never finish it, always finding something different to add to it. The sad thing is that the artwork of the studio was destroyed. The Merzbau was destroyed by a British air raid in October of 1943 (www.desighishistory.com). In the Telegraph it states

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