Kurt Schwitters

1887–1948

In Tate Britain

Walk Through British Art: 1940

Free entry

In Tate Britain

Prints and Drawings Rooms

5 artworks by Kurt Schwitters

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Biography

Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany.

Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.

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Artworks

Left Right

Kurt Schwitters Opened by Customs

1937–8
Kurt Schwitters Picture of Spatial Growths - Picture with Two Small Dogs

1920–39
Kurt Schwitters The Proposal

1942
Kurt Schwitters (Relief in Relief)

c.1942–5
Kurt Schwitters Aphorism

1923
Kurt Schwitters Magic

c.1936–40
Kurt Schwitters Red Wire Sculpture

1944
Kurt Schwitters Z 105 Portals of Houses

1918

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Artist as subject

Left Right

John Christie Homage to Ursonate

1981

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Unknown person(s) List of members for Artists Cafe at Hutchinson Internment Camp

December 1940
Unknown person(s) News article about Kurt Schwitters’ work

date not known
Philip Granville, Lord’s Gallery, recipient: Edith “Wanty” Thomas Letter from Philip Granville at Lord’s Gallery to Edith Thomas about their first meeting and Kurt Schwitters

29 August 1958
Unknown person(s) Note regarding payment for the sale of Schwitters’ collage work

30 September 1955
Kurt Schwitters Photocopy of a portrait of a man signed by Schwitters

date not known
Unknown person(s) Photograph of Kurt Schwitters, Edith Thomas, Sylvia Bartholomew with a group of Polish soldiers, Grasmere

1946
Margaret Miller, Museum of Modern Art (New York, USA), recipient: George Gatey & Son Solicitors (Windermere, UK) Letter to Geo. Gatey & Son solicitors from Margaret Miller at the Museum of Modern Art

25 February 1948
Unknown person(s) List of Schwitters’ works with measurements and dates with photocopy

10 March 1947

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Film and audio

Look Closer

Schwitters Interned

Discover Kurt Schwitters' response to being in a WW2 British Internment Camp
Listen

Schwitters in context: The British years – Part 2

This half-day conference brings together leading scholars in the field to discuss Kurt Schwitters’s British period and its broader ...
Listen

Curator's talk: Schwitters in Britain

Curator of the exhibition Schwitters in Britain Emma Chambers will give an exclusive insight into the creation of the show ...
TateShots

Contemporary Responses to Kurt Schwitters

Fictional Grandparents and an office designed by Frank Lloyd-Wright feature in two contemporary artistic responses to Kurt Schwitters

Features

Left Right

Tate Etc

Between terror and ecstasy: Artistic hallucination

Jean-FranÃ§ois Chevrier

Stories of hallucinations in art and literature date back to the Bible, but the idea of the artistic hallucination is ...
Tate Etc

Mexican encounters: Tate Acquisition I

Melanie Smith

Melanie Smith’s video Xilitla, which focuses on Edward James’s extraordinary gothic Mexican garden Las Pozas de Xilitla, was ...
Tate Etc

Tate Etc. issue 27: Spring 2013

Tate Etc. issue 27, Spring 2013; online edition of Tate's magazine
Tate Etc

Modernists don't die in Ambleside: Schwitters in Britain at Tate Britain

Paul Farley

Was this the same Kurt Schwitters, founder of Merz, collaborator with Dadaists, Cubists and Constructivists, who won first, second and ...
Tate Etc

The lonely radical: Marlow Moss at Tate St Ives

Lucy Howarth

At one stage the British artist Marlow Moss was at the heart of the European avant-garde, living in Paris where ...
Behind The Scenes

Archives & Access project: Animating the Archives – a new video series

Rebecca Sinker

Transforming Tate Britain, Archives & Access
Art Term

Assemblage

Assemblage is art that is made by assembling disparate elements – often everyday objects – scavenged by the artist or ...
Art Term

Dada

Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War in Zurich in negative reaction to the horrors and ...
Art Term

Merz

Merz is a nonsense word invented by the German dada artist Kurt Schwitters to describe his collage and assemblage works ...
Tate Papers

Tate Papers no.14: Autumn 2010

Read about William Blake’s exhibition of 1809, drawing as a modern art practice, and the concept of the sublime. The ...