German Dadaist Painter and Sculptor, 1887-1948 German painter, sculptor, designer and writer. He studied at the Kunstakademie in Dresden (1909-14) and served as a clerical officer and mechanical draughtsman during World War I. At first his painting was naturalistic and then Impressionistic, until he came into contact with Expressionist art, particularly the art associated with Der Sturm, in 1918. He painted mystical and apocalyptic landscapes, such as Mountain Graveyard (1912; New York, Guggenheim), and also wrote Expressionist poetry for Der Sturm magazine. He became associated with the DADA movement in Berlin after meeting Hans Arp, Raoul Hausmann, Hannah H?ch and Richard Huelsenbeck, and he began to make collages that he called Merzbilder. These were made from waste materials picked up in the streets and parks of Hannover, and in them he saw the creation of a fragile new beauty out of the ruins of German culture. Similarly he began to compose his poetry from snatches of overheard conversations and randomly derived phrases from newspapers and magazines. His mock-romantic poem An Anna Blume, published in Der Sturm in August 1919, was a popular success in Germany. From this time 'Merz' became the name of Schwitters's one-man movement and philosophy. The word derives from a fragment of the word Kommerz, used in an early assemblage (Merzbild, 1919; destr.; see Elderfield, no. 42), for which Schwitters subsequently gave a number of meanings, the most frequent being that of 'refuse' or 'rejects'. In 1919 he wrote: 'The word Merz denotes essentially the combination, for artistic purposes, of all conceivable materials, and, technically, the principle of the equal distribution of the individual materials .... A perambulator wheel, wire-netting, string and cotton wool are factors having equal rights with paint'; such materials were indeed incorporated in Schwitters's large assemblages and painted collages of this period, for example Construction for Noble Ladies (1919; Los Angeles, CA, Co. Mus. A.; see fig. 1; see also COLLAGE). Schwitters's essential aestheticism and formalism alienated him from the political wing of German Dada led by Huelsenbeck, and he was ridiculed as 'the Caspar David Friedrich of the Dadaist Revolution'. Although his work of this period is full of hints and allusions to contemporary political and cultural conditions, unlike the work of George Grosz or John Heartfield it was not polemical or bitterly satirical.   Related Paintings of Kurt Schwitters :. | Rain at Pont-Aven | Birch Grove (nn02) | Frederick Sodring | Details of A Philosopher giving a Lecture on the Orrery | seiner Frau |
Related Artists:
Peter Adolf Persson
painted View over the Landscape of Skane in 1889
Pompeo Mariani
(Monza, Province of Milan 1857 - Bordighera, Province of Imperia, 1927) was an Italian painter. The nephew of Mose Bianchi, Mariani abandoned a career in banking to devote himself entirely to painting. His apprenticeship began in 1879 under the guidance of the painter Eleuterio Pagliano, who introduced him to life studies. A trip to Egypt with Uberto DelleOrto in 1881 provided subjects for the works shown at the Brera exhibitions of the next two years. He focused on landscape painting and began to specialise in seascapes in 1883, when he first stayed on the coast of Liguria. The first views of the Zelata area outside Pavia appeared in 1894. His art is characterised by subtle sensitivity in the investigation of the reflection of light on water, captured in different seasons and times of the day to achieve highly atmospheric effects. In was at the beginning of the new century that he began to combine naturalistic landscapes with depictions of the elegant world of high society in fashionable gatherings and cafes. His vast production of landscapes and portraits was regularly presented at the major national and international exhibitions and won numerous official awards.
Newell Convers Wyeth
Newell Convers Wyeth (October 22, 1882 - October 19, 1945), known as N.C. Wyeth, was an American artist and illustrator. He was the pupil of artist Howard Pyle and became one of America's greatest illustrators. During his lifetime, Wyeth created over 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books, 25 of them for Scribner's, the Scribner Classics, which is the work for which he is best-known. The first of these, Treasure Island, was his masterpiece and the proceeds paid for his studio. Wyeth was a realist painter just as the camera and photography began to compete with his craft. Sometimes seen as melodramatic, his illustrations were designed to be understood quickly. Wyeth, who was both a painter and an illustrator, understood the difference, and said in 1908, "Painting and illustration cannot be mixedeone cannot merge from one into the other."