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WORLDS TOP ARTISTS
For top creative practitioners, see:
Best Artists of All Time.
For the greatest view painters, see:
Best Landcape Artists.
For the greatest still life art, see:
Best Still Life Painters.
For the greatest portraitists
see: Best Portrait Artists.
For the greatest genre-painting, see:
Best Genre Painters.
For the top allegorical painting,
see: Best History Painters.
WORLD'S BEST ART
For a list of the best examples of
Fine Art Painting, by the
world's top artists, see below:
Greatest Paintings Ever
Oils, watercolours, mixed
media from 1300-present.
Oil Painting
History, styles and development.
WHAT IS ART?
For an explanation of the
aesthetic issues surrounding
the creative visual arts, see:
Art Definition, Meaning
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World War I: Effect on Schwitter's Art
However, as World War I (from which he
was excluded due to his epilepsy) gradually took hold, his work became
more expressionist in
tone. During this time he worked on technical drawings in a machine factory
near Hanover. Here, he says, "I discovered my love for the wheel
and recognized that machines are abstractions of the human spirit."
He also married, and had two sons. The first, Gerd, died shortly after
birth; the second, Ernst, remained close to his father all his life.
In 1918, in response to the carnage of
the conflict and the resulting social and economic turmoil across Germany,
his entire attitude to art began to change. "What I had learned at
the academy was of no use to me.... Everything had broken down and new
things had to be made out of the fragments....It was like a revolution
within me."
Turns to Collage
Schwitters had already exhibited his expressionist
paintings at the Hanover Secession in February 1918. Then in June 1918,
he showed several semi-abstract expressionist landscapes at the renowned
Der Sturm gallery in Berlin. This brought him into contact with members
of the politically active Berlin avant-garde Dada movement, including
Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971), and Hans (Jean) Arp (1886-1966). At the instigation
of Arp, Schwitters now abandoned his traditional academic-style art techniques
and took up collage, and also started making assemblages from fragments
of refuse.
Schwitters and Dada
He also applied to join Berlin Dada probably
in late 1918 or early 1919. According to Raoul Hausmann, his request was
refused because of Schwitters' links to the Sturm gallery and to Expressionism
in general, which the politically-minded Berlin Dadaists rejected for
its absurd romanticism and borgeois aesthetics. Ironically, Schwitters'
art would prove him to be a more authentic and dedicated supporter of
Dada ideals than almost any other artist of his era. As it was, his work
was more in accord with the Dadaist philosophy being pursued in Zurich,
where artists were less political, favouring instead the pursuit of performance
and abstract art.
Merz Collages
Meanwhile, during the winter and spring
of 1918-1919, Schwitters put all his energy into his new "Merz"
collage paintings, incorporating a wide variety of "found" materials.
Dubbed by later critics as "psychological collage", these works
represented Schwitters attempt to make aesthetic sense of a world gone
mad - a world whose moral values and social norms were in pieces. It was
Schwitters unique vision to create a new art and a new aesthetic from
(literally) the pieces he found on the streets, and which he lovingly
restored. And in this highly symbolic activity, he perfectly expressed
the Dadaist concept that art could be made of anything, although unlike
most Dada artists he was (as his building activities suggest) a creator
rather than a critic - positive, not negative.
Recognition at Sturm Gallery
Schwitter's artistic breakthrough came
the following year, in June 1919. A solo exhibition of his new Merz pictures
at the Sturm gallery caused a furore among the critics. The works projected
a dynamic tension between abstraction and realism, aesthetics and trash,
art and life. Schwitters' use of colour,
his delicate balance and interplay between content and form, all demonstrate
his mastery of the collage genre. Suddenly, he found himself at the cutting
edge of contemporary art and the
full power of his imagination was unleashed. Mixing with a number of avant-garde
groups, including Bauhaus
design school teachers (Gropius, Schlemmer, Klee, Kandinsky, Feininger),
the emerging Contructivists from Russia, Eastern Europe and the Netherlands
(Theo van Doesburg, Lissitsky, Moholy-Nagy), as well as other Dada groups,
he organised lecture tours with other artists, like Arp, Hausmann and
the radical Tristan Tzara, holding provocative evening recitals and lectures
in cities across Europe. He also explored a range of other art forms,
such as drama and poetry, cabaret, printmaking, multimedia art, photography
and architecture. In 1923 he launched his Merz journal, followed in 1924
by a successful advertising agency (1924-30).
Merzbau (Merz building)
Also, in 1923, he began work on his masterpiece,
an extraordinary sculptural construction known as the Merzbau (Merz building),
resembling a modern-day Installation
or Environment. Built out of Schwitters customary scraps of paper, cardboard
and other rubbish, and originally named "Cathedral of Erotic Misery",
Schwitters worked on it at home until it gradually filled the entire building
from ground to roof.
Degenerate Art
Unfortunately, the rise of National Socialism
in Germany during the 1930s was a death-blow to many German painters and
sculptors, including Schwitters. The avant-garde artistic community scattered
or went into hiding, leaving many creative practitioners isolated and
vulnerable. Schwitters responded with a series of "New Merz Pictures",
which were more contemplative, more restrained and far less exuberant
than his earlier collages. In 1937, his work - along with that of Paul
Klee (1879–1940), Oskar Kokoschka
(1886-1980), Otto Dix (1891-1969), Max Beckmann
(1884-1950), Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880-1938), Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948),
and Marc Chagall (1887-1985) - was labelled
Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) by the Nazis, and in 1940, Schwitters
left Norway, where he was already in hiding, and fled to England.
He spent most of the war in London, drawing
inspiration from his new surroundings to create new Merz pictures, complete
with light-hearted references to the Old Masters and strong use of red
and black, recalling the palette of Nazi designers. In 1945, with funds
from the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, he relocated to the English Lake District,
where he began work on a new Merzbau known as the "Merz barn",
completing only one wall before his death in 1948 (now in Newcastle University).
Unfortunately, none of his other unique Merzbau works have survived.
Reputation
Schwitters was unquestionably an artistic
genius, as well as a committed humanist. His pioneering work in collage,
pictorial montage, mixed-media-sculpture (like his Merzbau)had a significant
impact on modern art movements like Arte Povera, Pop
Art, Fluxus, Happenings, and Conceptual
Art, as well as contemporary art movements like Junk Art, Neo-Dada,
Neo-Expressionism and general concepts of post-modernism.
His Merzbau was also an important influence on contemporary artforms like
Installation, Environment and Assemblage.
Way ahead of its time, Schwitters' creativity
was a huge influence 40 years later on the great contemporary artist Robert
Rauschenberg, who said, after viewing an exhibition of Schwitters'
work at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1959: "I felt like he made it
all just for me."
Paintings by Kurt Schwitters
Works by Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius
Schwitters can be seen in several of the world's best
art museums, including the Samuel R Guggenheim Museum New York and
the Museum of Modern Art MOMA, New York, as well as the Abbot Hall Art
Gallery in Kendal, England.
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