Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Schwitters is hailed as the godfather of everything from Happenings and Fluxus to performance art, conceptual art and multimedia art, claimed as a central influence by artists of the stature of Robert Rauschenberg, Damien Hirst and Ed Ruscha. A big, ebullient and hugely eccentric character who was known to bark himself to sleep at night like a dog — a designer, performance poet and stand-up comedian as much as an artist — Schwitters doesn’t quite fit with any of the established currents of 20th-century art.
Schwitters was a man of contradictions. He was born in 1887, raised and lived in Hanover which was the epitome of German bourgeois life. He was conventionally trained, could and did paint academic portraits and landscapes all his life. He had a bourgeois marriage and lived from the rents of property owned by his parents. Yet, he was one of the most original artists of the 20th century. He was a poet, an artist who collaborated with the Dadaists and other cutting edge art movements of the post WWI period while maintaining his independence.
He studied at the esteemed Dresden Academy alongside George Grosz and Otto Dix, later famous for their scabrous depictions of Weimar Germany, but he seems to have been unaware of them and indeed of die Brücke, the radical Expressionist group then active in the city. It took the First World War, in which he served as a draftsman, to break him out of his narrow, cosy, provincial shell. Everything had collapsed in Germany, and Schwitters, decided that, as in society, “new things had to be made out of the fragments. Thrift compelled me to take what I could find because we were an impoverished country. It is quite possible to cry out with refuse, and I did this by gluing and nailing it together.”
Read more at https://outrejournal.com/index.php/graphic-design/the-modernist-era/a-new-language-of-form/kurt-schwitters
