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“... No​ sooner had the First World War ended than the German painter Kurt Schwitters began to make collages out of ‘old train tickets, pieces of driftwood, cloakroom numbers, wire or wheel parts, buttons and other old junk from the attic or trash heap’. When this work was first shown in 1919, reactionary critics couldn’t see past the rubbish, condemning it as an anarchistic attack on fine art ...”

“... more directly referential of noise in the world than liberated from it; and others like Hugo Ball, Kurt Schwitters and Aleksei Kruchenykh advanced this line of linguistic invention more radically than Marinetti and company in any case. The assault on language was nonetheless central to the attack on the bourgeois subject, which is what interested Gramsci ...”

“... image emerges from the wreckage and is pasted down. Fifty years later, she was still making art. Kurt Schwitters (who became a close friend) died in 1948, Hausmann (who reinvented himself as a society photographer) in 1971, Grosz in 1959, Heartfield in 1968. Höch alone worked on. And as the show demonstrates, she understood that postwar consumerism had ...”

“... freedom’), Russian zaum (transrational) texts, and sound poems (Kandinsky, Arp, van Doesburg and Kurt Schwitters all produced important examples). The tension between medium-specific and cross-media impulses was generative for early abstraction. Against formalist critics, from Roger Fry through to Clement Greenberg, who stressed the decorous ideal of ...”

“... The book has three sections, the first a serie of ‘lives’ or glimpses of lives – Hart Crane, Kurt Schwitters, Marvin Gaye, an anonymous serial-killer – starting appropriately with a bouncy account of reading Plutarch; the second a series of places, people and moments in the poet’s own life; the third a Mexican (and I think in one case ...”

“... the agit-prop kiosks of the Russian Constructivists as well as the obsessive constructions of Kurt Schwitters. Hirschhorn seeks to ‘distribute ideas’, ‘radiate energy’ and ‘liberate activity’ all at once: he wants not only to familiarise his audience with an alternative public culture but to libidinise this relationship as well. Other ...”

“... of paper stuffed in a chest. In the visual arts, the scrap of paper would make the collages of Kurt Schwitters, born 1887; in dance, the broken gesture would be the signature of Nijinsky, born 1889; in music, of Stravinsky, born five days before Nescio. Where Wallace Stevens’s devotion to his day job seems touchingly American, the exit Nescio ...”

“... here and there are torn swatches of yellow, green and maroon. At first we seem to see an austere Kurt Schwitters collage from the early 1920s. Close up, we discover unadorned cardboard, plain or coloured card. The wings of the stage are decorated with pages from a dictionary. Front of stage are two rectangular, mobile panels, MDF or cork, decorated like ...”

“... a 45-minute barrage of cut-up language and nonsense syllables, in Potsdam in 1925, Kurt Schwitters was met first with gales of laughter and then with tears of admiration. Bern Porter, a physicist turned outsider artist, spent the war helping to build the atomic bomb, before turning his back on his career and devoting the rest of his often ...”

“... up. Musicians had time to practise, artists improvised paintings and sculptures. The Dadaist Kurt Schwitters, after years of neglect, relished his captive audience: ‘His pièces de résistance, beyond doubt, were sculptures fashioned out of state remnants of porridge, which he assiduously collected from breakfast tables. They had the colour of ...”

“... each containing a number of cultural references. The first combined Duchamp, Dostoevsky and Kurt Schwitters. ‘It proves,’ he wrote, ‘that the sublime is essentially inseparable from the ugly and comic.’ The second movement was designed to be ‘as boring as possible, like Proust, Palestrina, Zen, Gregorian chant, Missa, Parisian ...”

“... camp in 1940 is based on memoirs by Ronald Stent and Fred Uhlman, and includes a portrait of Kurt Schwitters. Here Smith is at her most Sebaldian: All round the room, balanced on broken lumps of wood, some on the broken-off legs of an old piano, are the greeny-blue-coloured sculptures of heads, beasts, indefinable shapes. They are lumpy, gritty ...”

“... that were hitherto unpublished in Britain’. The press’s list would include the poetry of Kurt Schwitters and Anatol Stern, Apollinaire’s calligrammes and the Pataphysics of Jean-Hugues Sainmont, Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, and Song of Bright Misery by Pol-Dives, the Parisian artist in whose home Stefan had hidden from the Nazis in ...”

“... elsewhere, but no matter; they are masterful. Buchloh then takes up the tale with El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, and Dada photo-collage, and it is bracing to re-encounter this work, which was passionately engaged in creating artistic responses to the trauma of the First World War, the rise of totalitarianism and the onrush of technological ...”

“... aspect of an altarpiece really like the ‘open’ aspect of, say, an assemblage by Kurt Schwitters? In my view the differences often overtake the similarities, but part of the point here is to irk diehard modernists like me, and on this score Nagel is effective (that installation art might want to recover aspects of medieval ritual is ...”