Kurt Schwitters (1887-1948) of Hanover, Germany, created a nonpolitical offshoot of Dada that he named "Merz," coined from the word kommerz ("commerce") in one of his collages. Beginning as a one-man art movement in 1919, his Merz pictures were collage compositions using printed ephemera, rubbish, and found materials to compose color against color, form against form, and texture against texture. His complex designs combined Dada's element of nonsense and chance with strong design properties. When he tried to join the Dada movement as "an artist who nails his pictures together," he was refused membership for being too bourgeois.
Schwitters wrote and designed poetry that played sense against nonsense. In the early 1920s, Constructivism became an added influence in Schwitters's work after he made contact with El Lissitzky (1890-1941) and Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931), who invited Schwitters to Holland to promote Dada. Schwitters and van Doesburg collaborated on a book design with typographic forms as the characters.
From 1923 until 1932, Schwitters published twenty-four issues of the periodical Merz, whose eleventh issue was devoted to advertising typography. During this time Schwitters ran a successful graphic design studio with Pelikan - manufacturer of office equipment and supplies - as a major client, and the city of Hanover employed him as typography consultant for several years. When the German political situation deteriorated in the 1930s, Schwitters spent increasing time in Norway and moved to Oslo in 1937. After Germany invaded Norway in 1940, he fled to the British Isles, where he spent his last years.