What can Kurt Schwitters tell us about the Lake District? What can the Lake District tell us about Kurt Schwitters?

This article focuses on Schwitters’ creative output during the final years of his life. Schwitters first visited the English Lake District in 1942, and was immediately smitten with the area. He lived there from July 1945 until his death in January 1948. It examines the nature of Schwitters’ engagement with the Lake District and situates this within the broader context of Schwitters’ longstanding interest in nature, reflecting on the ways in which notions of exile, outsiderness and the influence of German Romanticism shaped the work he made there, from conventional landscape paintings to the revolutionary Merz Barn.