Kurt Schwitters
German, 1887–1948
From 1931 Schwitters began spending much time in Norway, emigrating there in 1937 and painting landscapes, portraits, and still lifes to support himself. Several of his Merz pictures were included in Hitler's Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition held in Munich in 1937. When German troops entered Norway in 1939, Schwitters left for England, where in 1940-41 he was interned in displaced persons camps for seventeen months. After his release he settled in London, where he met the companion of his last years, Edith Thomas. In 1944 he suffered a stroke and subsequently moved to Ambleside in the Lake District, where he started the Merz-Barn in 1947. Despite his failing health due to a broken hip, asthma, and heart and lung problems, he continued to travel and to work, bartering his representational paintings for medical services and other necessities of life, and ekeing out a living by selling landscapes and still lifes to tourists. Still he clung to his "real" work, devoting his last energies to his collages and the organic sculpture of the Merz-Barn. On 8 January 1948 he died in Kendal and was buried in Ambleside.
Schwitters's work as a whole is characterized by rebelliousness, continuous experimentation, and a poetic and contemplative striving for order through the assemblage of the cast-off fragments of an alienated world. He did not receive major recognition until after his death.