Kurt Schwitters

Der Band bietet einen repräsentativen Querschnitt durch das Werk des Pioniers experimenteller Dichtung, des Schöpfers von „Merz“ und „Anna Blume“, des Dadaisten Kurt Schwitters.

Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) was one of the most influential European avant-garde artists to come to prominence in the interwar years. This book concentrates on Schwitters' lesser known late works, made during his time in Britain, but sets the scene by recounting and sumarising his earlier achievements.

Kurt Schwitters revolutionized the art world in the 1920s with his Dadaist Merz collages, theater performances, and poetry. But at the same time he was also writing extraordinary fairy tales that were turning the genre upside down and inside out. Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales is the first collection of these subversive, little-known stories in any language and the first time all but a few of them have appeared in English. Translated and introduced by Jack Zipes, one of the world's leading authorities on fairy tales, this book gathers thirty-two stories written between 1925 and Schwitters's death in 1948--including a complete English-language recreation of The Scarecrow , a children's book illustrated with avant-garde typography that Schwitters created with Kate Steinitz and De Stijl founder Theo van Doesburg. Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales also includes brilliant new illustrations that evoke the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Schwitters wrote these darkly humorous, satirical, and surreal tales at a time when traditional German fairy tales were being co-opted by the Nazis. Filled with sharp critiques of German life during the Weimar and early Nazi eras, Schwitters's tales are rich with absurdist events and insist that not everyone--and perhaps not anyone--lives happily ever after. In "Lucky Hans," the starving protagonist tries to catch a rabbit only to have it shed its fur like a coat and run off naked into the forest. In other tales, a sarcastic gypsy stands in for a fairy godmother and an army recruit is arrested for growing to monstrous size. Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales is a delightfully strange and surprising book.

Die Publikation zeigt erstmals die besondere Qualität seiner Collagen und Assemblagen aus dieser sehr produktiven Zeit auf: Sie wurden stilistisch lockerer und formal freier und die Bedeutung der Farbe nahm zu. Materialien aus der Natur, wie Steine, Treibholz und Federn, fanden zunehmend Verwendung. Einflüsse aus seiner norwegischen Umgebung beeinflussten auch Schwitters Malerei, neben abstrakten Gemälden entstanden viele naturalistische Landschaften.

"The first anthology in English of the critical and theoretical writings of the great German artist Kurt Schwitters, considered by scholars, museums, devotees, and collectors alike to be one of the most important "thinking artists" of the twentieth century, surpassed only by Marcel Duchamp in his influence on subsequent generations. Throughout his life Schwitters wrote and published in many genres-and across genres. His children's stories and his poetry and fiction have been translated into English, as have a handful of essays. But most of his critical writing has never been translated into English, and this volume even includes material that has never been published in any language--until now. Schwitters was a prolific writer, lecturer, and critic who penned important works about architecture and design, "the problem of painting" (before it was fashionable to do so), media, aesthetics, style, abstraction, concrete writing, politics, and more. Issuing this book will be a major publishing event in the history of modern art and in the history of this extraordinary artist. The translations are superb, making the volume an extraordinary resource for art historians, curators, critics, and artists. Megan Luke's introduction is accessible, and for the first time, a large field of Schwitters's writing is available not just to Anglophone readers but to readers of numerous nationalities who consider English the lingua franca of their work"--