Typical collage ca. 1929 - Dadaism Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) belongs, together with Mondrian and Malevich, to the great masters who gave modern art a new adventurous direction in the twentieth century. Nazism and war forced Schwitters to spend much of his life in exile. This exile was also artistic: his contact with German art was difficult. But since the appearance of Beuys in the 1960s, and later artists such as Baselitz and Kiefer, it has become clear that Schwitters is precisely the patriarch of the post-war flourishing of German art in Europe.