Kurt Schwitters Quotes (1887-1948)

“Dada rejects emphatically and as a matter of principle works like the famous 'Anna Blume' [poem, published in 1919] of Kurt Schwitters”

“Whatever became of '''Kurt Schwitters'''' novel Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling (Franz Müller's Wire Spring), several chapters of which we composed together? Is it buried under the bomb ruins of his house on Waldhausenstrasse in Hannover? For hours, Schwitters and I [Hans Arp] sat together and spun dialogue, in rhapsody. He took these writings and channeled them into his novel.. .We sat together again, writing Franz Müllers Drahtfrühling: Hans Arp: The nightingales have had enough of your hymnal Karagösen. Play violin on parrots, but avoid the women red hood ans snow widow. Kurt Schwitters: Should I pe-trify something for you? Or would you like play cry together? H. A.: Should we wash our tears or drown them? K. Schw.: You are a sipsnipper, Since when do your diamonds bark? H. A.: The water is getting hard. A fruit cries out loud and gives birth to a fish. K. Schw.: I'll p-ut it in the sea, or should I st-ab you with it?”

“Then we went down to his work room, in the horrible beautiful Merz grotto [Merz-Haus / MerzBau, built by Schwitters in Hannover as his studio], where broken wheels paired with matchboxes, wire lattices with brushes without bristles, rusted wheels with curious Merz cucumbers.. .How often did we 'p-lay' in this room! Schwitters called playing, considering the sweat, working. There we glued [collages] together our paper pictures, and as I tossed away one of my glued-together works one morning, Schwitters asked, 'You don't like it? Can I have it?' – 'What do you want with this failed piece of toast?' Schwitters took a good look at it and said, 'I'll put what's on top on the bottom, I'll stick a little Merz nose in this corner and I'’ll sign the bottom Kurt Schwitters.' And, yes indeed, this collage became a wonderful picture by Kurt Schwitters. Schwitters was a wizard, just as Hokusai was a wizard.”

“It needs a poet like Schwitters to show us that unobserved elements of beauty are strewn and spread all around us and we can find them everywhere in the portentous as well as in the insignificant, if only we care to look, to choose and to fit them into a comely order.”

“One of my first sculptures was made of bicycle parts. I was living at that time in a attic in the red light section of Amsterdam. I started to work without any specific materials. I was looking in the street, like when I was a young boy, in the garbage cans, for ropes, wires, and paint. I left my parents in 1940. Years later I saw an exhibition of Kurt Schwitters at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam curated by Willem Sandberg and there I saw the real 'objet trouvé'; until then I had never heard about it. Schwitters was a shattering experience.”