The Building Studies series examines important buildings through original documents, detailed text, photography, and drawings in an affordable format.

A definitive resource, full of fresh insights and new revelations, on one of the most influential interwar artists This richly illustrated book offers a definitive new assessment of the oeuvre of Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948), a central figure of the interwar European avant-garde. Active as an artist, designer, publisher, performer, critic, poet, and playwright, Schwitters is best known for intimately scaled, materially rich collages and assemblages made from found objects--often refuse--that the artist described as having lost all contact with their role and history in the world at large. Considering works reaching from Schwitters's earliest collage-based pieces of 1918-19, through his 1920s advertising designs, to his seminal environmental installation the Merzbau, Graham Bader carefully unpacks the meaning behind such projects and sheds new light on the tumultuous historical conditions in which they were made. In the process, he reveals a new Schwitters--aesthetically committed and politically astute--for our time. This authoritative account reframes our understanding of Schwitters's multifaceted artistic practice and explores the complex entwinement of art, politics, and history in the modern period.

German artist Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is best known for his pioneering work in fusing collage and abstraction, the two most transformative innovations of twentieth-century art. Considered the father of installation art, Schwitters was also a theorist, a Dadaist, and a writer whose influence extends from Robert Rauschenberg and Eva Hesse to Thomas Hirschhorn. But while his early experiments in collage and installation from the interwar period have garnered much critical acclaim, his later work has generally been ignored. In the first book to fill this gap, Megan R. Luke tells the fascinating, even moving story of the work produced by the aging, isolated artist under the Nazi regime and during his years in exile. Combining new biographical material with archival research, Luke surveys Schwitters’s experiments in shaping space and the development of his Merzbau, describing his haphazard studios in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom and the smaller, quieter pieces he created there. She makes a case for the enormous relevance of Schwitters’s aesthetic concerns to contemporary artists, arguing that his later work provides a guide to new narratives about modernism in the visual arts. These pieces, she shows, were born of artistic exchange and shaped by his rootless life after exile, and they offer a new way of thinking about the history of art that privileges itinerancy over identity and the critical power of humorous inversion over unambiguous communication. Packed with images, Kurt Schwitters completes the narrative of an artist who remains a considerable force today.

Simonâ__s latest scheme is to gain everlasting fame and glory by winning the school talent show. What stands in his way? A lot. Thereâ__s the fact that he doesnâ__t sing, dance, or play a musical instrument. Thereâ__s Stacy and her distracting brown eyes. Thereâ__s the evil Mike McApline and his cronies. And last, but certainly not least, is the aged Mrs. Anaand, who insists on bombarding Simon and his friends with dangerously hard muffins while they rehearse their act. Utter humiliation is looking a lot more likely than fame and glory for Simonâ__s band, The Groovy Guys. This hilarious chapter book features illustrations, pages from Simonâ__s secret notebook, and a glossary.

"The first anthology in English of the critical and theoretical writings of the great German artist Kurt Schwitters, considered by scholars, museums, devotees, and collectors alike to be one of the most important "thinking artists" of the twentieth century, surpassed only by Marcel Duchamp in his influence on subsequent generations. Throughout his life Schwitters wrote and published in many genres-and across genres. His children's stories and his poetry and fiction have been translated into English, as have a handful of essays. But most of his critical writing has never been translated into English, and this volume even includes material that has never been published in any language--until now. Schwitters was a prolific writer, lecturer, and critic who penned important works about architecture and design, "the problem of painting" (before it was fashionable to do so), media, aesthetics, style, abstraction, concrete writing, politics, and more. Issuing this book will be a major publishing event in the history of modern art and in the history of this extraordinary artist. The translations are superb, making the volume an extraordinary resource for art historians, curators, critics, and artists. Megan Luke's introduction is accessible, and for the first time, a large field of Schwitters's writing is available not just to Anglophone readers but to readers of numerous nationalities who consider English the lingua franca of their work"--

At the end of World War I, the German artist Kurt Schwitters dramatically broke with dominant artistic traditions by adopting collage as the primary medium for his literary and visual production. In The Collages of Kurt Schwitters: Tradition and Innovation, Dorothea Dietrich demonstrates how collages function for the artist. Characterising Schwitters's work as the product of the deep social and political crises of the Weimar Republic, Dietrich challenges the prevalent outlook that twentieth-century art can be reduced to a revolutionary struggle of avant-garde artists against an entrenched artistic tradition. The Collages of Kurt Schwitters argues for a more nuanced view, in which revolutionary art forms are exposed as containing much that is traditional and, indeed, reactionary.

In the 1930s, anyone traveling to Djupvasshytta in Norway might have run into the improbable figure of Kurt Schwitters, selling his landscapes and portraits to visiting tourists. Schwitters (1887-1948) had discovered the beauty of Norway on his first trip there in 1929, subsequently holidaying in the northwestern part of the country. In January 1937, the artist followed his son Ernst into exile, and constructed his second Merzbau, the Haus am Bakken (House on the Slope), near Oslo, where he remained until the Germans moved in to occupy the country in April 1940. Schwitters in Norway is the first book to examine the stylistically looser and more colorful collages and assemblages, with their pronounced use of natural materials such as stone, driftwood and feathers, as well as the abstract and landscape paintings, from this particularly productive period of the artist's life. With nearly 100 color plates, this volume greatly enriches our picture of one of last century's most influential artists.

One girl, one painting a day...can she do it? Linda Patricia Cleary decided to challenge herself with a year long project starting on January 1, 2014. Choose an artist a day and create a piece in tribute to them. It was a fun, challenging, stressful and psychological experience. She learned about technique, art history, different materials and embracing failure. Here are all 365 pieces. Enjoy!