Editing Kurt Schwitters (section)

===Der Sturm===
Schwitters was to come into contact with [[Herwarth Walden]] after exhibiting expressionist paintings at the Hanover Secession in February 1918. He showed two ''Abstraktionen'' (semi-abstract expressionist landscapes) at Walden's gallery [[Der Sturm]], in Berlin, in June 1918.<ref>''Dada'', Leah Dickerman, National Gallery of Art, Washington p. 432</ref> This resulted in meetings with members of the [[Berlin ]] [[avant-garde]], including [[Raoul Hausmann]], [[Hannah Höch]], and [[Hans Arp|Jean Arp]] in the autumn of 1918.<ref name=archive1/>
<blockquote>
"[I remember] the night he introduced himself in the Café des Westens. "I'm a painter," he said, "and I nail my pictures together." 

— Raoul Hausmann<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.dieterwunderlich.de/Kurt_Schwitters.htm |title=Kurt Schwitters (Biografie) |publisher=Dieterwunderlich.de |access-date=17 February 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20091023110428/http://www.dieterwunderlich.de/Kurt_Schwitters.htm |archive-date=23 October 2009 |url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite web |url=http://capa.conncoll.edu/morton.merzbook.html#9 |title=Colin Morton: The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems |publisher=Capa.conncoll.edu |date=7 November 1918 |access-date=17 February 2012 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20111019155636/http://capa.conncoll.edu/morton.merzbook.html#9 |archive-date=19 October 2011 |url-status=live}}</ref>
</blockquote>

Whilst Schwitters still created work in an expressionist style into 1919 (and would continue to paint realist pictures up to his death in 1948), his first abstract collages, influenced in particular by recent works by Jean Arp, would appear in late 1918, which Schwitters dubbed ''Merz'' after a fragment of found text from the phrase ''Commerz Und Privatbank'' (commerce and private bank) in his work ''Das Merzbild'', completed in the winter of 1918–19.<ref>Kurt Schwitters, Center Georges Pompidou, 1994, p. 47</ref><ref>The ''Merzbild'' can be seen in the centre of the [[Entartete Kunst]] (Degenerate Art) exhibition, 1937, directly below the phrase 'Nehmen Sie Dada Ernst', and was presumably destroyed by the Nazis shortly afterward.</ref> By the end of 1919 he had become a well-known artist, after his first one-man exhibition at Der Sturm gallery, in June 1919, and the publication, that August, of the poem ''[[An Anna Blume]]'' (translated as 'To Anna Flower', or 'To Eve Blossom'), a dadaist, non-sensical love poem.
As Schwitters's first overtures to Zurich and Berlin Dada made explicit mention of Merz pictures,<ref>
Raoul Schrott, dada 15/25, Haymon Verlag, Innsbruck 1992, pp. 225, 229</ref> there are no grounds for the widespread claim that he invented Merz because he was rejected by Berlin Dada.