Looking for Mr Schwitters

Looking for Mr Schwitters tracks the final years of the émigré artist Kurt Schwitters, who fled Nazi Germany in 1937, never to return home. Interned as an enemy alien by the British, he settled eventually in England’s Lake District, close to the author’s future home, accompanied by his young English lover.

Once celebrated as an avant-garde artist, famed for incorporating found objects and rubbish into his art, Schwitters created an astonishing variety of artworks suffused with the Lakeland landscape, bartering portraits and landscapes simply to survive. Just months before his pauper’s death in Kendal, he embarked upon his final (unfinished) masterpiece: transforming an ordinary barn up the Langdale Valley into a magical, walk-in sculpture.

Neither straightforward biography, nor memoir, nor art history, Jennifer Potter’s book exists in its own class. Drawing on personal memory and deep research, she interrogates Schwitters’ artistic legacy, his connection to place, and her own lifelong fascination with the man and his art, ultimately reclaiming for him his pivotal role in modern art.