Knowra Kurt Schwitters Kurt Schwitters Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) was a German artist and writer who made collage, assemblage, and poetry. He called his cross-disciplinary avant-garde practice Merz.
Merz : An artistic practice Schwitters developed from collage and assemblage, extending across visual art, poetry, and architecture. This name became Schwitters’s umbrella for an art practice built from fragments.
Merzbau : Schwitters’s evolving, room-sized installation of columns, niches, and collected materials in Hanover. This immersive construction carried Merz from the picture surface into domestic space.
Hanover : A city in northern Germany where Schwitters lived and developed much of his early artistic practice. His first Merz works and the original Merzbau took shape in this city.
Hannah Höch : A German Dada artist known for photomontage and incisive critiques of gender and mass culture. Her Berlin Dada practice offers a close comparison with Schwitters’s collage-based experiments.
Neo-Dada : A postwar art tendency that renewed Dada’s use of chance, everyday objects, and anti-art gestures. Later artists revisited strategies that Schwitters had developed through Merz.
Collage : An art technique that combines pasted paper, images, and other materials on a surface. Schwitters made collage a central method for turning discarded printed matter into art.
Ursonate : Schwitters’s sound poem, composed of invented syllables and structured in four movements. Its performed nonsense sounds show Merz operating through voice rather than visual fragments.
World War I : A global conflict fought from 1914 to 1918, centered on Europe and involving many world powers. The postwar material shortages and upheaval formed the setting for Merz’s emergence.
Raoul Hausmann : An Austrian-born artist and writer associated with Berlin Dada and the development of photomontage. Hausmann’s Dada circle rejected Schwitters’s independent Merz identity.
Fluxus : An international network of artists who made experimental events, publications, and works across art forms. Fluxus performances and intermedia works echo Merz’s refusal to keep art forms separate.
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