SCHWITTERS, Kurt

Born and raised in Hannover, a modest North Germany city roughly halfway between Berlin and Cologne, Schwitters was denied membership in the Berlin Dada Club and so took the word Merz, which he made the title of his Hannover magazine (1923–27). (Marc Dachy characterizes it as a verbal and semantic clone of Dada.) Schwitters's initial masterpieces were brilliantly colored Collages composed of printed ephemera, such as ticket stubs, used toward abstract ends (that is, an appreciation of the composition...