n order to present Kurt Schwitters, one of the great minds of the century, who was born in Hanover in 1887 and died in England very poor in 1948, it is best to borrow three quotations from the text Harald Szeeman dedicated to him in the catalogue of the 1994 Pompidou Center show.
From Kurt Schwitters : "A game with serious problems. That is art".
"We play until death comes and gets us."
From Hans Richter : "And that's how he pasted, nailed, wrote poems, made typographical compositions, sold, printed, composed, did collages, recited, whistled, barked and loved, bellowing, never minding anybody, the public, a given technique, established art and himself. He did all and most times all at the same time. His guideline was less the total art work according to Ball or Kandisnky, the temporal combination of all the arts, than the idea of continuously blurring the limits and integrating the arts within one another, including the machine in art as an "abstraction of the human mind", kitsch, chair legs, singing and whispering.
In reality, HE was the total art work: Kurt Schwitters."

DADA's strongest personality, he created MERZ. One of his most outstanding works was his mere presence in 1933 at a dinner given by the German Press Union for the Futurist Marinetti. Again in the catalogue of the Pompidou center, we find an extraordinary account of that banquet by Lucia Moholy-Nagy who attended it along with her husband and Schwitters. Attending were Hitler*, a great admirer of Mussolini's, Göring, Hess**, Goebbels, Gerhart Hauptmann and Robert Ley, patron of the Nazi organization "Kraft durch Freude" (Power through Joy) - who committed suicide during the Nuremberg trial. Sitting next to Schwitters, Ley had to listen in amazement to his beautiful ravings. It may be regretted that there are neither recordings nor pictures of the end of the banquet, when Marinetti bellowing his poem "Der Überfall auf Andrianopel" started pulling the tablecoth and tipped wine and dirty dishes on Hitler's lap.
Kurt Schwitters soon exiles himself in Norway then, with the German arrival, runs away to England where he lands on June 19, 1940. He is interned in Camp Hutchinson, on the Isle of Man, along with two thousand German nationals, most of which are anti-nazi intellectuals. The camp becomes, according to the writer Fred Uhlman, one of the best universities in Europe. He writes in his book "The making of an English man" that Schwitters had himself built a dog kennel just big enough for him to sleep in and that from time to time he would come out of it barking with the sound of a dachshund. He kept up with his work as an artist, nailing wood, or painting on linoleum. He also produced porridge sculptures, which gave off a sickening smell.
He is seen here barking outside his dog kennel with a German plane, just come from bombing Liverpool, flying overhead.

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