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. Potter adopts a thread of memory and personal connections to tell a wider story about the process of making, and seeing, art. She turned Schwitters into one of the foundational myths of her life as a writer.

But how true are her memories? Why did this long dead émigré artist take control of her imagination? And what can he tell her about the place she looks on as home? Looking for Mr Schwitters is not a biography, nor an art book, nor a memoir, but occupies a beguiling space between these genres, a book in its own class. Rigorously researched but written for the general reader this new book shines a light on the artist’s final years and reclaims his rightful place in the history of modern art.