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 emigre 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.

Looking for Mr Schwitters includes black and white images, a full colour section of Kurt Schwitters' art and a photo essay by Rob Petit.

Author: Jennifer Potter

Cumbria & Lake District, c 1939 to c 1945 (including WW2), Individual artists, art monographs, Biography: arts & entertainment, Memoirs

Published on 4 Jun 2026 by Little Toller Books.