Kurt Schwitters was one of the most engaging mavericks of the art of the 20th century. His art is invariably grouped with Dada, although personal clashes prevented him from being admitted formally to membership, and by nature he would never be fully committed to any collective movement, even one of protest: his lack of interest in politics set him apart from the main group of German Dadas, as did his residence in Hanover rather than Berlin. Yet paradoxically Schwitters was intrinsically a Dada: the Dada poet Tristan Tzara wrote that Schwitters was “one of those personalities whose inner structure was always Dada by nature. He would still have been Dada even if the Dada call had not been sounded.” By 1918, at the age of 31, he had discovered that he was not at heart a painter, but that for him the essence of art lay in the combination
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