Kurt Schwitters’s performance of Ursonate (1932), sonata for the human voice, is easy to find on the Web: a series of jagged one- or two-syllable sounds breaking all melodic conventions, it nonetheless has an insistent musicality. Schwitters was also a painter, sculptor, poet and, for nearly a decade, the editor of the avant-garde periodical Merz, an outlet for his interest in modernist typography. ‘Merz’ was also the name Schwitters used to describe his assemblages of found objects; he turned his own home in Hanover into an artwork, the ‘Merzbau’, characterised by a profusion of smooth planes and sharp edges. The Merzbau was bombed by the RAF in 1943, but photographs remain – and can be seen among some 300 works by this singular artist at the Musée Picasso in Paris (6 October–7 February 2027).
Find out more from the Musée Picasso’s website.
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