Looking for Mr Schwitters

by Jennifer Potter

Looking for Mr Schwitters tracks the final years of the émigré artist Kurt Schwitters, who fled Nazi Germany, 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 infused with the Lakeland landscape, bartering portraits and landscapes simply to survive. Just months before his pauper’s death, he embarked upon his final, unfinished masterpiece: transforming an ordinary barn up Langdale 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 restoring his pivotal role in modern art.

The book contains photographs, a selection of Schwitters art, and a photo essay by the filmmaker Rob Petit.

Paperback

About the author

Jennifer Potter, born in 1949, writes about the history and culture of plants, plantsmen and gardens. She reviews regularly for the Times Literary Supplement, and has been variously a Royal Literary Fund Fellow, a Hawthornden Fellow and an Honorary Teaching Fellow on the Warwick Writing Programme.