Kurt Schwitters

A seminal figure among European avant-garde artists of the 1920s, Kurt Schwitters participated in the Expressionist and Dada movements in Germany and in the international phenomenon known as Constructivism. The printed word—its appearance, meaning, and sound—was a constant source of inspiration for Schwitters. He used printed and stamped letters in his collages and poems, and by the mid-1920s had become a successful graphic designer. Schwitters's involvement with traditional printmaking techniques, however, was limited, as he focused more on ephemeral printed projects.
In 1918, after serving in World War I, Schwitters began publishing his poetry in the Expressionist journal Der Sturm and associating with the artists surrounding this journal and gallery of the same name. The title of Schwitters's book, Die Kathedrale, reflects the Expressionists' embrace of the Gothic cathedral as an emblem of unification in the arts. The white square of paper on the cover, part of a wraparound seal added by Schwitters, declares, "Beware: Anti-Dada." At this point, the Dadaists were antagonistic toward Schwitters, whom they considered bourgeois and not sufficiently political.
"Merz," a play on the German word for commerce, was an overarching term Schwitters used to describe collages, poems, and performances he created by combining such elements as bits of odd paper found in the streets, snippets of overheard conversation, or fragments of text from everyday sources. Between 1923 and 1932 he also published a journal entitled Merz, which comprised twenty-four issues. The third issue is a portfolio of lithographs that served as a special edition of the journal. In typical Dada fashion, he included random elements such as found typographic fragments and photographic images in these prints. However, his concurrent incorporation of geometric abstraction demonstrates his growing involvement with the Constructivist aesthetic.