Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters was a German artist born June 20, 1887, in Hanover, and died January 8, 1948, in Kendal, England. Excluded from the official Berlin Dada group, Schwitters built his own one-man movement he named Merz, after a fragment of the word Kommerz that appeared in one of his collages, assembling pictures, poems and sculpture from tram tickets, wrappers, string and other everyday debris. His most ambitious work, the Merzbau, transformed several rooms of his own Hanover house into an evolving abstract construction beginning around 1923, dated by Tate to 1933 in its developed form, before it was destroyed by Allied bombing in 1943. He fled Nazi Germany in 1937, eventually settling in England, where he began a second Merzbau that remained unfinished at his death.