It was the bus tickets in his collages that caught my attention, or so I have always believed: Ribble bus tickets, my bus tickets, which gifted me a precept for living. If Kurt Schwitters could transmute the stuff of everyday into art — and get away with it — maybe I could make something from the scraps of my life, too. But memory plays tricks. What we see and what we remember do not necessarily coincide.
My connection to Schwitters has been a lifetime in the making. When I was ten, my family settled in Ambleside, up a hillside called the Gale. From the top terrace, you looked down upon the eccentric boarding house on Gale Terrace where the German refugee artist and his young English lover first took lodgings in the summer of 1945. My exposure to his art came later, on a school expedition to Abbot Hall in Kendal, which sparked my enduring obsession with the man and his late artworks: abstracts, landscapes, portraits, assemblages, sculptures, and those strange little collages constructed mostly from rubbish, which the poet Michael Hofmann ranked among the few truly great, imperishable creations of the twentieth century.
For the past three years, I have tracked the artist across the Lakeland of my childhood, trying to understand why he matters so much to me, and to anyone intrigued by the alchemy that is art. Interweaving family and art histories, I have drawn my material into a new book, working title: The Schwitters Connection, A story of art, place and belonging, which looks at how the Lake District beloved by Wordsworth, Ruskin and Beatrix Potter worked its magic on this errant modernist in exile, a German refugee catapulted into a very English community immediately after the war.
The Prologue and associated images give a taste of what I hope the book will become.
***
The Schwitters Connection, A story of art, place and belonging
By Jennifer Potter
‘Make connections, if possible between everything in the world.’
Kurt Schwitters
PROLOGUE
10 January 1948
Low cloud and rain still blanketed the churchyard on that miserable January afternoon when a clutch of mourners gathered at St Mary’s, Ambleside, to bury the German refugee artist, Kurt Schwitters, lord of the collage and maestro of junk and disorder. Hailed as one of the original masters of the modern movement, he was largely forgotten — in Britain at least — when he died on 8 January 1948 from acute pulmonary oedema and myocarditis in the old workhouse hospital in Kendal. Aged just 60 and a half years old, he looked a good deal older, plagued by a catalogue of illnesses and misfortune that rarely dented his good humour until his final collapse, when he cried like a baby for all the unmade art still fizzing in his brain, and in his hands.
The group that huddled beside his open grave was oddly mismatched for a small Lakeland town struggling to resume normal life after the disruptions of the war. Chief among the mourners were Schwitters’ young English girlfriend, Edith Thomas, a London girl better known as ‘Wantee’ (she called him ‘Jumbo’ in return), smartly dressed as ever but shivering in her thin coat, and Schwitters’ photographer son Ernst, flown in from Norway at the last minute, who still found time to ogle the nude tableaux of dancing girls at London’s Windmill Theatre before travelling north to hold his dying father’s hand.
Another foreigner and refugee from Nazi Germany was the Jewish artist Hilde Goldschmidt then living with her mother on the Langdale Estate, who eked out a living selling fur gloves and mittens and teaching leatherwork at the estate’s social centre. Aside from Wantee’s sister Jill Blundell and her husband, the other mourners were local people who had befriended the penniless couple and shown them real kindness. They included little Harry Bickerstaff in his owl glasses (‘Bicky’ to Schwitters and Wantee), who taught at Ambleside’s elementary school; Bicky’s wife, Nancy; and Dr George Ainslie Johnston, chess companion and friend, who had inherited his practice from Ruskin’s doctor, Dr George Parsons, and emerged from retirement when his junior partner went off to war. Schwitters’ portrait of Dr Johnston pondering his next chess move, given to the good doctor in lieu of services rendered, is one of his very best, everyone agrees.
A special place beside the grave went to retired landscape gardener Harry Pierce, owner of the Cylinders estate in Elterwater, from whom Schwitters rented an old hay barn which he hoped to transform into the greatest walk-in sculpture of his life, the Elterwater Merz barn, scarcely begun when life finally ran out on him. (Merz was the name he gave to all his works in whatever artform, taken from a fragment of newsprint that appeared in one of his early collages.)
Also likely to be present that rain-soaked afternoon were Pierce’s son Bill, a hulk of a man like Schwitters himself, who undertook to weatherproof the barn, and Pierce’s gardener Jack Cook, who plastered the barn walls and gave what other help he could. Their Langdale friend, Gwyneth Alban (nicknamed ‘Guiness’ by Jumbo) had gone home for the Christmas holidays and not yet returned.
‘Form and colour,’ was Schwitters’ explanation when Cook asked him what it all meant, those plaster swirls and rag-taggle objects poked into niches in the barn’s end wall. And that’s all it was, said Cook many years later. If you looked at the Merz barn in those lights, you accepted it for what it was, just form and colour, not representing anything at all.
*
They buried Schwitters in a plain elm casket transported the 13 miles from Kendal in a motor hearse belonging to the Ambleside firm of Christopher & Burrows, whose bearers carried the coffin into St Mary’s Church and down to the open grave. Undertaking was a sideline; the firm also supplied loose covers, curtains, mattresses, cabinets, joinery and paperhanging services.
Although custom decrees that the chief mourners arrive at church with the hearse, Ernst Schwitters, Wantee and the Bickerstaffs walked in heavy rain from their homes in Millans Park, just around the corner. While bedridden with a broken leg, Schwitters had complained to a friend in Germany about the church bells noisily ringing in the New Year.
After the service, the mourners returned to the Bickerstaffs for the funeral tea, cracks already apparent in the relationship between the dead man’s mistress and his son, which would descend into open warfare in the legal wrangles that ensued over Schwitters’ estate. For the moment, an uneasy peace prevailed.
*
St Mary’s Church is an eyesore, it must be said. Pushed to the edge of town and perched on a rocky outcrop above the grassy graveyard, it was designed in neo-Gothic style by George Gilbert Scott and promoted by William Wordsworth in the belief that Ambleside deserved a more spacious house of God to accommodate the town’s many tourists than the old vernacular chapel up St Anne’s Hill. Wordsworth didn’t live to see the new church consecrated, but the social theorist Harriet Martineau — like Schwitters, an offcomer to Ambleside — was quick to condemn the bad taste of its architecture, which she viewed as more of a blemish than an adornment on account of its size and clumsiness, castigating its east window as ‘remarkably ugly’.
I doubt if Schwitters came here much, if at all. Art was his God and painting a form of praying. Had he entered the church, he would have discovered one of the few traces left behind by the Royal College of Art, evacuated to Ambleside during the war: a time-lapsed mural depicting various stations of the town’s annual rushbearing ceremony painted on the west wall by final-year student Gordon Ransom, a sort of sub-Stanley Spencer without the transcendence, in which townsfolk projected an idealised version of their real selves, sweet little girls in sunhats and short dresses, young men in Oxford bags, bearing their floral wreaths, crosses, the odd harp and sheaths of rushes to freshen the air in church. Schwitters didn’t think much of British art — the Englishman talks mainly of the weather, he told a Hanover dealer, being a good poet but a bad painter and sculptor — and his contact with RCA students or staff was minimal during the month or two their stays in the town coincided.
You’ll find little trace of Schwitters, either. Ambleside lacks a Kurt Schwitters Hill, a Merz Terrace or a Schwitters Lane. Even his grave is empty, his body removed to Hanover at Ernst’s behest. The simple headstone erected by Edith Thomas in 1966 marks merely his absence, the ghost of a ghost whose bones were returned to German soil.
But if you stand close to where he first lay underground and turn your back to church and town, you look through the boundary trees and across the River Rothay to the lower slopes of Loughrigg Fell, where Schwitters and Wantee often went walking when the day’s painting was done. He called it their ‘Lieblingsplatz‘, their favourite place in all the Lakes.
It’s one of mine, too.
And I can think of no other occupant of St Mary’s churchyard (however temporary) whose modest funeral expenses were met by one of the great modern art museums of the western world, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, which graciously consented to Wantee’s wish that funds for this purpose could be diverted from a grant intended to support the artist’s final – unfinished – masterwork, the Elterwater Merz barn.
PHOTO CREDITS
- Author’s photograph of Kurt Schwitters at Cylinders, Elterwater, 24 September 2022.
- Post card in author’s collection. From the top of St Mary’s spire, the small terrace of three houses to the right (Gale Terrace) is where Schwitters and Wantee first took lodgings in June, 1945. The dot among trees a little above and to the right of Gale Terrace is Gale How, the author’s childhood home from 1960.
- Schwitters and friends outside the shippon at Cylinders, Elterwater. From l. to r.: Gwyneth Alban, Edith ‘Wantee’ Thomas, Jack Cook (standing), Kurt Schwitters, Harry Pierce, Hilde Goldschmidt.
- Untitled (Portrait of George Ainslie Johnston) by Kurt Schwitters (1946). Courtesy of The Armitt Museum and Library, Ambleside.
- Author’s photo, detail from Kurt Schwitters’ Merz Barn Wall at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle, managed by Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums on behalf of Newcastle University.
- Untitled (Y.M.C.A. OFFICIAL FLAG THANK YOU) by Kurt Schwitters (date1947). Courtesy of Abbot Hall, Lakeland Arts, Kendal.
- © Tate Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unported).
- Untitled (Smithy Brow, Ambleside) by Kurt Schwitters (1946). Courtesy of The Armitt Museum and Library, Ambleside.
- Author’s family album. The young Potters on the terrace of Gale How in the early 1960s, behind them the ‘glorious views’ praised by Schwitters in a letter to his mother dated New Year’s Day, 1946, unaware that she had died three days previously.
- Author’s photograph of Kurt Schwitters’ empty grave in St Mary’s Churchyard, Ambleside,
