Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany.

Schwitters worked in several genres and media,

including dadaism, constructivism, surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.

After studying art at the Dresden Academy alongside Otto Dix and George Grosz, (although Schwitters seems to have been unaware of their work, or indeed of contemporary Dresden artists Die Brücke^[4]), 1909–1915, Schwitters returned to Hanover and started his artistic career as a post-impressionist. In 1911 he took part in his first exhibition, in Hanover. As the First World War progressed his work became darker, gradually developing a distinctive expressionist tone

Directly affected by the depressed state of Germany following World War I, and the modernist ethos of the Dada movement, Kurt Schwitters began to collect garbage from the streets and incorporate it directly into his art work. The resulting collages were characterized by their especially harmonious, sentimental arrangements and their incorporation of printed media. He actively produced artistic journals, illustrated works, and advertisements, as well as founding his own Merz journal. He wrote poems and musical works that played with letters, lacing them together in unusual combinations, as he’d done in the collages, in the hope of encouraging his audience to find their own meanings. His multiple avant-garde efforts culminated in his large merzbau creations. These works, collaborations with other avant-garde artists, would start with one object to which others were added, causing the whole piece to change and evolve over time, growing to great proportions that forced the viewer to actually experience, rather than simply view, the art.

Important Art by Kurt Schwitters

1-Revolving (1919)

Artwork description & Analysis: This work demonstrates a significant shift in Schwitters’ early artistic practice from primarily conservative figurative painting to abstract collage. After World War I, Schwitters began to collect broken and discarded materials he found on the streets and arrange them into works of art. Born from the rubble left by the war, these works emphasize the fact that art can be made from destruction; that urban detritus could be made into something beautiful. In Revolving, found items are organized to form lines and shapes to which he adds bits of yellow and blue paint for shading.

2-(The Clown) (c. 1945-7)

Artwork description & Analysis: Fashioned from plaster and found objects, this diminutive assemblage is characteristic of the mixed media sculptures Schwitters produced toward the end of his life, while exiled in England. Despite its unassuming stature and materials, this sculpture embodies the enduring tenderness and whimsy unique to the artist’s oeuvre.

my favorite art pieces of his:

I really enjoy looking at Kurt’s art as it has a lot of texture, color, and meaning to it. I also like the fact that he uses anything like garbage scraps and scraps left from the after war to create his master pieces.

 Photomontage is the process and the result of making a composite photograph by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping two or more photographs into a new image. Sometimes the resulting composite image is photographed so that a final image may appear as a seamless photographic print. A similar method, although one that does not use film, is realized today through image-editing software. This latter technique is referred to by professionals as “compositing”, and in casual usage is often called “photoshopping” (from the name of the popular software system). A composite of related photographs to extend a view of a single scene or subject would not be labeled as a montage.

history of photomontage:

The first and most famous mid-Victorian photomontage (then called combination printing) was “The Two Ways of Life” (1857) by Oscar Rejlander, followed shortly thereafter by the images of photographer Henry Peach Robinsonsuch as “Fading Away” (1858). These works actively set out to challenge the then-dominant painting and theatrical tableau vivants.

In 1916, John Heartfield and George Grosz experimented with pasting pictures together, a form of art later named “Photomontage.”

The pioneering techniques of early photomontage artists were co-opted by the advertising industry from the late 1920s onward. The American photographer Alfred Gescheidt, while working primarily in advertising and commercial art in the 1960s and 1970s, used photomontage techniques to create satirical posters and postcards.

this is probably the first photomontage ever came out

late 20th century photomontage eh Hannah Hosh

Hannah Höch ; 1 November 1889 – 31 May 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage.^[1] Photomontage is a type of collage in which the pasted items are actual photographs, or photographic reproductions pulled from the press and other widely produced media.

Höch was not only a rare female practicing prominently in the arts in the early part of the 20^thcentury – near unique as a female active in the Dada movement that coalesced in her time – she also consciously promoted the idea of women working creatively more generally in society. She explicitly addressed in her pioneering artwork in the form of photomontage the issue of gender and the figure of woman in modern society. Her transformation of the visual elements of others by integrating them into her own larger creative projects evidenced a well-developed early example of “appropriation” as an artistic technique.

Tableaux Photography:

what is it?

A tableau vivant, French for ‘living picture’, is a static scene containing one or more actors or models. They are stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, with props and/or scenery, and may be theatrically lit. It thus combines aspects of theatre and the visual arts.

The idea of tableaux photography is so that we can re create famous images by finding similar props and outfits. The setting and lighting also have an imapct on the outcomes for tableaux. The whole point is to make the image as close to the original as possible. Therefore the setting and all the models expressions have to be near enough the same.

Above this post are all of our class attempts for tableaux photography. We found it quite challenging to keep the same facial expressions because we were stationed in all sorts of positions so at the end of the day most of the outcomes are either fairly blured or fairly dark, however re- creating the images from Caravaggio was quite fun.

Mood Board:

These are just examples taken off google images when searching in ‘ Tableaux Vivant’ some examples in the mood board above are actually examples from Tom Hunter, who’s worked is based on tableaux photography.