SOURCE: "Kurt Schwitters, Merzkunstler: Art and Word-Art," in Word and Image, Vol. 6, No. 1, January, 1990, pp. 100-18.

In the following essay, Shaffer investigates the multiple genres of Schwitters's oeuvre—including visual and literary works: collages, poems, essays, performances, and plays. Shaffer concludes, "We need a new reading of the full verbal and visual core of his work, which is more extensive and more significant for all his work than has been understood hitherto. "

Kurt Schwitters was born in Hanover in 1887, trained in Dresden (1909-13) and Berlin and, on being condemned by National Socialism as a 'cultural bolshevik' whose works were displayed in the Entartete Kunst ('Degenerate Art') exhibition of 1937, fled from Hanover in that year, first to Norway and then in 1940 to England, where he died in Ambleside in 1948. Since the series of retrospectives, beginning in 1956, he has been widely recognised as one of the important German artists of...