Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters was born on 20 June 1887 in Hanover, in the German Empire. He trained at the Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) in Hanover from 1908 to 1909, then studied at the Kunstakademie Dresden (Dresden Academy of Art) from 1909 to around 1914; no source reviewed documents a formal diploma from either institution.

In 1919 Schwitters coined the term Merz, taken from a fragment of the word "Kommerz" in a collage, to describe his practice of building paintings, collages, and later entire rooms from found and discarded materials. He began constructing his first Merzbau, an evolving, cave-like accretion of wood, plaster, and refuse, inside his family's house in Hanover, and he associated loosely with Dada and Constructivist circles across Germany and Europe.

His work was condemned by the Nazi regime and included among the pieces labeled "degenerate" in the Entartete Kunst campaign of the 1930s. Schwitters fled Germany, moving first to Norway and then, after the German invasion of Norway in 1940, to Britain, where he was for a period classified and interned as an enemy alien before settling permanently in England. In 1947 the Museum of Modern Art in New York awarded him a fellowship, which he used to begin a third Merzbau, the Merz Barn, in a barn at Elterwater in the Lake District. The project was unfinished when Schwitters died on 8 January 1948 in Kendal, England (some sources give the more specific locality as Little Langdale, in the same area of the Lake District); the Armitt Museum, near where he lived his final years, describes him as dying "in poverty and obscurity." A surviving fragment of the Merz Barn wall is now held by the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle.

Schwitters's reputation rests on his role as a bridge between Dada's anti-art provocations and the more formally rigorous collage and installation traditions that followed. He is widely credited as an originator of assemblage and installation art, though his reputation has often lagged behind contemporaries such as Duchamp or the Bauhaus circle. Museum attention has grown steadily since his death, from a 1962 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art through the 2010 to 2011 traveling survey Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage, organized by the Menil Collection in Houston, which framed him as a pioneer of installation art who worked with an unusually wide range of materials. Recent scholarship, including Megan R. Luke's Kurt Schwitters: Space, Image, Exile, winner of the Dedalus Foundation's 2015 Robert Motherwell Book Award, has focused renewed attention on the late, exile-period work made in Norway and Britain.

Schwitters's auction market is defined by a single benchmark sale rather than a deep, continuous trading history. His record is Ja, Was, Bild (Yes, What, Picture), a 1920 painting-collage that sold at Christie's London on 25 June 2014 for GBP 13,970,500, then reported in the financial and art press as roughly USD 23.7 to 23.8 million, resetting his prior auction high. Day-to-day, no single gallery holds exclusive representation of the estate; dealers such as Bernard Jacobson Gallery in London actively exhibit and deal in his collages and assemblages, alongside the museums and foundations that steward the bulk of his archive.

Schwitters's market has very little in the way of a regular trading rhythm; his record sale in 2014 is the dominant public data point, and lower-value works on paper and collage trade only occasionally. No catalogue raisonne could be confirmed for this profile, so provenance research typically runs through the Kurt and Ernst Schwitters Foundation in Hanover and through the specialist dealers who handle his estate material, rather than through a single authenticating catalogue. Collectors should also weigh the documented gaps in his biography, the loss of the original Merzbau in Hanover during the Second World War, and his displacement through Norway and wartime Britain, when assessing the completeness of any given work's history.