Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters was born in Hanover in 1887, the only child of a shopkeeper who retired early and lived on rental income — a comfortable bourgeois background that he spent his career methodically ransacking for materials. He enrolled at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1909, graduated in 1914 into a Germany that was about to destroy itself, and spent the war years in Hanover making serviceable Expressionist paintings. His first collages appeared in late 1918, using fragments of commercial print, ticket stubs and newspaper. He named the practice Merz, extracting the syllable from a found scrap reading “Commerz und Privatbank” — a characteristic move: the name of his movement came from rubbish.

In June 1919 he showed work at the Der Sturm gallery in Berlin and published An Anna Blume, a love poem addressed to a grammatically impossible beloved that sold tens of thousands of copies. The Berlin Dada group, centred on Richard Huelsenbeck, did not invite him in. The reasons are contested; their falling-out happened by mid-1920, and probably involved Anna Blume’s commercial success as much as any political argument. Schwitters’s response was characteristic: he started his own movement. Merz was not a collective but a one-man operation — or rather, it was whatever Schwitters decided it was on any given day.

From 1923 he edited and published Merz magazine: 24 issues over nine years, collaborating with El Lissitzky, Jean Arp, Theo van Doesburg, and Jan Tschichold. He was simultaneously running Merzwerbe, a small Hanover advertising agency handling accounts for Pelikan inks and Bahlsen biscuits, and from 1929 served as the official typographer for Hanover City Council. The man who had been rejected by the Dadaists was designing municipal stationery. He saw no contradiction.

The Merzbau was growing in the family home all this time. It was not designed — it accumulated. Schwitters added grottos, columns of plaster, and embedded objects given by Hannah Hoch, Raoul Hausmann, Sophie Taeuber. By 1937 it occupied six rooms. On 2 January 1937, he left for Norway, ahead of a Gestapo interview. He never came back. The Merzbau was destroyed in Allied bombing in 1943.

He built again: a second Merz environment at Lysaker near Oslo, destroyed by fire in 1951. Then the Merzbarn at Cylinders Farm in the Lake District — unfinished at his death on 8 January 1948, the day after he received British citizenship. The barn wall is preserved at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle. A MoMA fellowship that would have funded the work arrived by telegram the same week he died.

Schwitters did not have a design philosophy in the sense of a doctrine he could set down in a manifesto. What he had was a practice: take what is at hand, arrange it until it holds together, and call the result Merz.

The theoretical content of Merz, such as it is, runs like this: art is not a category reserved for fine materials and trained hands. It is a quality of attention — something that can be brought to a bus ticket, a scrap of wallpaper, a torn Pelikan label. The fragment is not lesser material; it is material with history already in it, which is more than a blank canvas offers. What the artist does is not add significance but reveal what significance is already there.

“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.” — Kurt Schwitters

Applied to typography, this meant treating the printer’s type-case as a studio. Die Scheuche uses only printer’s rule, dots, brackets and letterforms — no drawing, no illustration — to tell a fairy tale with a scarecrow made of capital letters. The page is not a field for text; it is a visual surface on which marks are composed. This is the same argument Jan Tschichold formalised in Die neue Typographie (1928), and Tschichold had seen Schwitters work.

Applied to architecture, Merz meant that a house could be a work of art — not decorated, but fundamentally altered by the accretion of meaning over time. The Merzbau was not architectural in any conventional sense; it was the built-up residue of a daily practice that happened to require a building.