''Kurt Schwitters: Artist Philosopher'' is published to accompany an exhibition at Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London. In an essay, Mel Gooding focuses on what Kurt Schwitters is most famous for-the abstract collages that he began to make in the winter of 1918/19 using found and everyday objects such as labels, bus tickets, fabric and bits of broken wood. They were born out of his feeling that, after the war, ''Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz.'' Schwitters' undogmatic and non-elitist art, by elevating the rejected, the discarded and the useless to fine art, inspired such postwar pioneers as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Eduardo Paolozzi, Richard Hamilton and Joseph Beuys; and he is now seen as the grandfather of many post-1945 art movements, from Pop art to Conceptual, installation and performance art.