Kurt Schwiiters - photomontage

Kurt Schwiiters is generally acknowledged as the twentieth century's greatest master of collage. Born in Hanover on 20 June, 1887, the only child of affluent parents, he was a loner in his youth, plagued by epileptic attacks, introverted and insecure, and as a student at the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden he proved as apt as he was unimaginative. Although his contact with Expressionist artists in Hanover after 1916 gave him more confidence to develop his own style, even his most impressive works were little more than competent imitations of his contemporaries.

In 1919, Schwitters approached Tristan Tzara, the spokesman of the Zurich Dadaists, and the group greeted his work with enthusiasm. He found further stimulus in the activities of the Berlin Dadaists, whose scandalous activities were making headlines in the same year. Raoul Hausmann’s anecdote that Schwitters was rejected by the Berlin Dadaists is, however, dubious, for their self-appointed leader, Richard Huelsenbeck, supported Schwitters from May 1919 onwards and visited him in Hanover at the end of the year.
 The two finally fell out in 1920,probably because of an argument about Dada publications. Certainly there are no grounds for the tale that Schwitters invented Merz because he was rejected by Dada, for he used his Merz pictures to introduce himself both to Tzara and Huelsenbeck.

 With the rise of National Socialism in Germany after 1929, Schwitters found himself in serious difficulties. The international network of the avant-garde community disintegrated and Schwitters gradually ceased his public activities. The death of his father and of Theo van Doesburg in 1931 mark the start of a new phase of his work, as Schwitters himself makes clear in 'New Merz Picture', with its contemplative mood and coarse dabs of colour. The sombre restraint of Pino Antoni is likewise in sharp contrast to the works of the exuberant early Merz period.

Schwitters’ work was ruthlessly defamed by the Nazis, and he kept a low profile during the Third Reich. His works were exhibited in a series of ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibitions that began early in 1933 and culminated in the infamous 'Entartete Kunst' exhibition in Munich in mid-1937. The printed edition of his literary masterpiece, a sound poem named the Ursonate, was seized by the SS in the same year and publicizing the Merzbau became impossible in Germany. His careers as an artist, writer and typographer came to an end, and he was robbed of much of the urban impetus that had been crucial to his work.

As his professional sources of income dried up, he spent more and more time in Norway painting portraits and landscapes and selling them to tourists. He emigrated to Norway in January 1937, for reasons that have never been fully explained, though the Gestapo were certainly on his trail, possibly because of his connections with the Hanover Resistance, which had been uncovered in autumn 1936. I like Schwiiters photomontage work as it has a verity of techniques within it, he uses a rough, rugged and torn look for some pieces and then uses a neat, tidy and computerised look for others. I prefer the rougher and older looking images as I think they look better because you can see how they are pieced together and this shows you that you can do something of the same quality as Shwiiters yourself and by hand.