Looking for Mr Schwitters

Jennifer Potter’s new book resurrects the pivotal artist Kurt Schwitters and places him firmly in The Lake District, where he lived as a penniless refugee in the years after the Second World War. Derided as a ‘degenerate artist’ by the Nazis he fled Germany for Norway and then Britain, where he was interned as an ‘enemy alien.’ At the end of the war he travelled to the Lakes with his young English girlfriend. Renowned for incorporating found objects and rubbish into his art, Schwitters let the spirit of the Lakes creep into his work, dashing off a stream of collages, sculptures, landscapes, portraits, flowers, abstracts and assemblages, which he sold or bartered for essentials. Just months before his pauper’s death in Kendal, he embarked upon his last masterpiece, never finished, a walk-in sculpture magicked from a disused barn in the Langdale Valley.