ABSTRACT
Kurt Schwitters was born in 1887 in Germany, and died in 1948 in England, having lived as an 'enemy alien' in various internment camps in the United Kingdom between June 1940 and November 1941. A painter, poet and playwright, he was also a graphic designer and a typographer. In poetry, an example of Merzdichtung was Schwitters's Ursonate, first presented in 1925. Applying psychoanalytic theories to art may be an impossible as well as an inadvisable task, for it easily becomes an exercise in reductionism. Psychoanalytic and aesthetic concepts share another characteristic, albeit their modes of experience and forms of thought are different. Schwitters's work began to be considered part of the modern degenerate art and became overtly ridiculed and mocked. George Steiner considered Schwitters's creation, in any ordinary sense, a non-existent event. Photographs of the Merzbau were exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the late 1930s.
