Looking for Mr Schwitters - a new book

Aim

To produce an innovative and finely illustrated book about the émigré artist Kurt Schwitters’ final years in the Lake District.

'A geologically inclined pastoral;  an ode to the Lakes; an eye-opening  portrait  of post war bucolicism ; an unravelling of family secrets....and a dogged quest for the trail of Kurt Schwitters whose collages form a template or model for this extravagantly variegated  book.' Jonathan Meades

Jennifer Potter's new book resurrects a pivotal artist - the German-born Kurt Schwitters - and places him firmly in the soil of Potter's native Lake District, where Schwitters lived, and died, as a penniless refugee in the years just 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. 

You may never have heard of Kurt Schwitters, but you will find his influence everywhere. He was one of the rising stars of modern art in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, renowned for incorporating found objects and rubbish into his art.

But despite his reputation as an urban artist, he 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 like food and false teeth.

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 up the Langdale Valley, where once the Elderwater Gunpowder Company stored its gunpowder. The Merz Barn is empty now, its sculpted wall transported to Newcastle University's Hatton Gallery.

What's especially exciting about 'Looking for Mr Schwitters,' for us at Little Toller is the way in which Jennifer has adopted a thread of memory and personal connections to tell a wider story about the process of making - and seeing - art. First exposed to his work as a teenager, Jennifer turned him 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 it 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 in the English Lakes and reclaims for him his rightful place in the history of modern art.

Why do we need your help?

We're delighted to have raised the £7,500 we need to publish 'Looking for Mr Schwitters,' but we are keeping the Crowdfunder open for now so we can ensure we have enough funds to publish the book appropriately, in a publishing environment, where costs are rising all the time.  

As well as paying for the editorial, printing marketing, sales and publicity for the book, the money raised will go towards permission fees and image costs for a whole range of illustrations: Schwitters' art, archival photographs of the Lake District, informal photographs of the artist taken by Ernst, his son; maps; and commissioned photography by the filmmaker Rob Petit. It will also help fund the additional paper and production costs incurred by printing some of the illustrations in colour. 

About Jennifer

Jennifer Potter is the author of four novels and six works of nonfiction, all infused with a sense of place. Martinique, the Yemen, France, and the marshlands of Suffolk and East Sussex provided the backdrop to her novels while 'The Jamestown Brides' took her to Virginia in pursuit of a forgotten episode of colonial history. A Royal Literary Fund Fellow and later an RLF Consultant Fellow, she has enjoyed writing fellowships at universities, at Hawthornden Castle and the British Library and continues to mentor doctoral researchers and early-career academics with their writing.

About Little Toller Books

Little Toller Books is an award-winning independent publisher based in Dorset. It has published books by Jeff Young, Tim Dee, Dara McAnulty, Richard Mabey, Iain Sinclair, Fiona Sampson, Caro Giles and Horatio Clare. It also publishes Nature Classics, which keep alive the great books of writing about nature and the countryside.

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made