Hannover Merzbau: View with Blue Window, Kurt Schwitters, ca. 1930
This, the first of Schwitters’ Merzbau experiments, was a pioneering hybrid art and architecture installation that he constructed in his parents’ house in suburban Hanover between 1923 and 1936. This continuous creative project was a work without precedent, and one that even his closest friends found difficult to grasp. Schwitters himself struggled to explain what he was doing, for art at this time was what you looked at, not what surrounded you, and our now familiar terms of ‘Environment’ and ‘Installation’ had not yet been invented.
