Our friends at the brilliant Little Toller Books have just launched a new crowdfunding project for Looking for Mr Schwitters — an innovative and finely illustrated book about the émigré artist Kurt Schwitters’ final years in the Lake District.

Jennifer Potter’s new book resurrects the pivotal German-born artist 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.

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.

Money raised through crowdfunding will contribute to the editorial, printing, marketing, sales and publicity costs for the book, as well as going 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.

Find more information about the project, and make a donation, here.