Schwitters is best known as the inventor of Merz, a form of dadaism. He was one of the most original artists of this century and, unlike the dadaists, was not concerned with creating artistic anarchy. He wanted to build a new art out of the waste products and throwaways of the old. He became the first great master of collage - using, among other things, torn-up paper, bus tickets, cigarette packets and street debris.
In 1920, he started his first Merzbau, a vast construction which expanded to fill his house, with its caves and tunnels. The Nazis declared Schwitters' work degenerate in 1937 and he fled to Norway, where he built the second Merzbau, (destroyed in 1951 as the first had been in 1943).
In 1940, he escaped from Norway to England where he was interned for a period on the Isle of Man, and after a period in London, he lived in Ambleside from 1945. The Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal has three Schwitters abstracts, including 'YMCA Flag, Ambleside'; there are also three other works of his which are conventional portraits and still-lives. The people of Ambleside found his abstract art more or less incomprehensible and these conventional pieces were a concession to local taste. It is extraordinary to think that this most original avant-garde artist was prepared to join the local art society as a gesture of good will to Ambleside. His great work of these last eight years was the Elterwater Merz, a large three-dimensional assemblage which was built in a barn. The whole wall was moved to the University of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1965, where it can be seen in the Hatton Gallery. Richard Hamilton, who taught for many years at Newcastle University after the war, supervised the move. Schwitters (who was naturalised the day before he died) has been called the greatest influence on modern British art and Andrew Graham-Dixon has described the Merzbau as 'the most important work of modern British art'. Richard Hamilton himself was immensely influential in the origin and development of 'Pop Art' in the 1950s and 1960s.