Kurt Schwitters: A Journey Through Art
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Price: $40.66
You Save: $19.34 (32%)
List Price:
Price: $40.66
You Save: $19.34 (32%)
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Schwitters Kurt
Kurt Schwitters: Color and Collage (Menil Collection)
 List Price: Price: $240.00 DescriptionBest known for his extraordinary abstract collages, German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is one of the most influential figures of the international avant-garde. Emphasizing the significance of color and light in the artist’s work and delving into the relationship between collage and painting, this handsome volume accompanies the first U.S. retrospective of the artist’s oeuvre in twenty-five years. Affiliated with Dada and the Constructivist movement in the years following WWI, he coined the term “merz” to describe his ambition to “make connections, preferably between everything in the world.” Schwitters’s merz gave seemingly worthless objects of urban waste—train tickets, newspaper fragments, bits of wire—new life as compositional elements in his installations, assemblages, sculptures, and collages. Hoping to unify life and art by incorporating everyday objects into his work, this pioneer of installation art came closest to his ideal with Merzbau, a room-size walk-in sculpture constructed entirely of found materials. Alongside images and analysis of a full-scale reconstruction of Merzbau, this book includes an illustrated chronology and 90 color plates of Schwitters’s assemblages, reliefs, sculptures, and collages, with emphasis on merz works from the 1920s and 1940s. The selection not only illuminates the artist’s response to the dominant art movements of his time but also illustrates his unique composition and design. Essays by prominent scholars provide new perspective on the artist who created poetry from the commonplace.
PPPPPP: Poems Performances Pieces Proses Plays Poetics
 List Price: Price: $12.35 You Save: $5.60 (31%) DescriptionKurt Schwitters' stated goal was to "erase the boundaries between the arts." This collection, culled from the five-volume German edition of Schwitters' writings, introduces the total work of art that is Merz through Schwitters' words. Included is the complete text for the "Ursonate," Schwitters' legendary and lengthy epic of sound poetry, which, as poets, editors and translators Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris comment, "is to sound poetry what Joyce's Ulysses is to the twentieth-century novel."
Lucky Hans and Other Merz Fairy Tales (Oddly Modern Fairy Tales)
 List Price: Price: $14.19 You Save: $8.76 (38%) DescriptionKurt 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.
Kurt Schwitters Free Spirit
 List Price: Price: $17.37 DescriptionThe book gives a flavour of what the German artist/poet, Kurt Schwitters, achieved in his lifetime and what he meant to the people of the English Lake District and the wider world.Born in Hanover in 1887, Schwitters fled Germany in 1937, going first to Norway, then to Britain, where he was interned for a year and a half as 'an enemy alien'. He was discharged from the Hutchinson Square Internment Camp on the Isle of Man in 1941 and lived for a time in London, where he forged links with a group of surrealist artists and poets many of whom were fellow fugitives from the Nazis. In London he was rebuffed by Kenneth Clarke, was refused work as a window dresser by Selfridges and met the teenage Jazz musician, George Melly. Together with his companion, Edith Thomas, he settled in Ambleside in the English Lake District in 1945 where he died in 948. Famed for an innovative Dada 'Merzbau', created within his house in Hanover, Schwitters began a second Merzbau in Norway but was forced to abandon the work when he fled to Britain. Both works were subsequently destroyed. In Ambleside he painted landscapes for tourists, portraits for 'locals' and collages for himself. He also began another Merzbau in a barn at Elterwater near Ambleside. But Schwitters died before the Merzbarn was finished; the work was removed to the Hatton Gallery at Newcastle University in the 1960's where it can be seen today. Schwitters is known as 'the creator of Merz' (his own form of Dadaist art) and for his saying, 'I have so little time'. His Dadaist poem, 'an Anna Blume', won him international fame in the 1920's. He was a prolific writer. This book seeks to express, in layman's terms and simple language, something of what Kurt Schwitters achieved in his lifetime. It is a 'Merz' book; it throws together words/articles/quotes/opinions and transforms them into a printed/written collage. It is an essential handbook for the 'man in the street'. Schwitters Kurt News
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Hartford CourantHarry White Turns Surroundings Into Living ArtworkWhite says she told him he was "the American version of Kurt Schwitters," a German artist known for incorporating castoffs and found objects in his montages. "The thing about Americans is you do things with such a sense of humor," White says she told