Anything can be used to make art

IN 1919 Kurt Schwitters, a German artist, snipped the letterhead of a local bank as part of his first collage. "Merz", sliced out of "Kommerz- und Privatbank", became his trademark, shorthand for the idea that anything—including rubbish—could be used to make a work of art. This radical concept has come to be seen as the foundation of much pop and conceptual art, evident in the work of artists such as Richard Hamilton and Damien Hirst.
“En Morn” 1947 Source: Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne “Untitled (Quality Street)” 1943 Source: Sprengel Museum, Hannover/ DACS 2012
“Untitled (Opening Blossom)” 1942-45 Source: Sprengel Museum, Hannover/ DACS 2012 Conceived in Schwitters's hometown of Hanover, "Merz" became more central to his work in 1937, when he was forced to flee the Nazi regime via Norway into exile in England. Wherever he was, whether on an icebreaker in the North Sea, an internment camp on the Isle of Man, in London or the Lake District, he made art with whatever materials were at hand. "Everything an artist spits out is art," he declared in 1933.
His British work in exile, spanning his last eight years, demonstrates his creative vitality until the end. It also underpins what Penelope Curtis, Tate Britain's director, calls his "living influence" on British artists. This communion between artists over time is at the heart of "Schwitters in Britain", a show of the artist's late works now on at Tate Britain in London. The exhibition juxtaposes 180 of Schwitters's pieces with those of his contemporaries from the 1940s, and includes newly commissioned works by Adam Chodzko and Laure Prouvost.

Schwitters's versatility is impressive. The works on display include hand-held sculptures, collages, paintings (some startlingly good portraits and landscapes), drawings and fragments of the "Merz Barn", a stone building in the English countryside that he was turning into a sculptural installation at the time of his death in 1948. An audio clip features Schwitters performing his poem "Ursonate". Most of these pieces have not been seen in Britain since the Tate hosted the Museum of Modern Art's first big retrospective of the artist in 1985.
Loosely identified with the European Dada movement, Schwitters shared ideas and friendship with the modernist avant-garde that included Max Ernst, Hans Arp and Marcel Duchamp. Branded a "degenerate" artist by the Nazis, he was forced to abandon his "Merzbau", a painstakingly assembled architectural interior in Hanover, later destroyed by a bomb. Although Schwitters resisted interpretations of his collages, it is hard not to perceive a certain wistfulness in a piece that combines steamship schedules and the label "Made in Britain".

In exile his work exploded in many directions. A vibrant example is "Glass Flower" of 1940, an abstract collage of curves with a central bloom made of glass and wood. The curators hang it beside the 1937 "Mz Oslo Fjord", whose echoing contours make it a painted doppelgänger of the sea-swept glass assemblage. Nature was a source of both material and inspiration for Schwitters, says Emma Chambers, one of the exhibit's curators. In the 1946 collage "15 pine trees" he layers corrugated cardboard in vertical stripes that form a slice of forest. A series incorporating snippets of Old Master paintings is endlessly fascinating; there is humour, too, as in a modified portrait with the title "This was before H.R.H. The Late Duke of Clarence and Avondale. Now it is a Merz picture. Sorry!"

Most striking for many will be the portraits Schwitters painted while incarcerated for 16 months as an "enemy alien" at the Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man. These loose, confident paintings brim with intimacy and life, like others he made in Cumbria in his final years. Long derided as bread-and-butter work, unworthy of any self-respecting modernist, these affecting landscapes, still lifes and portraits are an important part of Schwitters's oeuvre, says Ms Curtis. The show aims to give equal weight to the abstract and figural work of this great artist, she says. "Both were ways he looked."