Tag Archives: Kurt Schwitters

To the Shores of Lake Placid

Landscape of Liberty: from Auschwitz to Ambleside

My quest for heritage in the landscape takes me over a wintry Lingmoor Fell to the Merz Barn in Elterwater and finally to Windermere library where I learn of 300 children who survived the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt to start a new life here beside the lake. They described their journey as one “from hell to paradise”.

Lingmoor Fell

Snow clouds are forming, light as yet, smudges of soft graphite like finger blurs of a 3B pencil sketch, bunched together like blankets on an unmade bed. Through the gaps, shines an ethereal yellow light, haunting, heavenly. For an unapologetic atheist, the experience is unnervingly religious. These celestial beams spotlight the shoulders of the Langdale Pikes, illuminating bands of warm ochre between the iced granite of their snowy summits and their long skirts of winter scrub.

The Langdale Pikes
The Langdale Pikes

Ling is the Norse name for heather and Lingmoor is just that; now in January, dead foliage wraps the fell in a winter coat of chocolate. From Blea Tarn House, I climb beside a ghyll to a wall at its head, cross a stile and track the line of a fence up the slope. A further step stile leads to the summit at Brown How, and here the brutal force of the wind hits home, forty miles per hour, gusting over fifty. I’m buffeted about and struggle to retain balance.

Lingmoor Fell
Lingmoor Fell

I find a little respite in the lee of the cairn and look east to Windermere, a long slim finger of molten silver. This tranquil stretch of water shares a surprising legacy with a busier waterway I knew as a kid. In my pre-teen years, we lived near Rochester in Kent. I learnt to dinghy sail on the River Medway, in the shadow of the Royal Naval dockyard at Chatham. Cargo ships were a common hazard, their arrival invariably coinciding with a lull in wind, necessitating some frantic paddling. Forty years earlier, we’d have had something swifter to contend with. 

Windermere from Brown Haw
Windermere from Brown How
Windermere from Brown How
Windermere from Brown How

In 1937, the Short brothers began production of the Sunderland ‘Flying Boat’ at their factory near Rochester Castle. These seaplanes could land and take off from water and would play a significant role in WWII, particularly in the North Africa campaign, where they protected supply convoys sailing from the USA to Britain. In 1939, however, the Luftwaffe began targeting the Medway, and a decision was made to move production somewhere more secure. It 1941, manufacture moved to White Cross on the shore of Windermere. 

Just under half of Shorts’ Westmorland work force comprised local labourers. The rest moved up from Rochester. To house them all, a purpose-built estate of red brick bungalows was erected at Troutbeck Bridge. With asbestos roofs, indoor bathrooms and hot running water, the Calgarth Estate was modern by Lake District standards, and by 1942 it boasted a primary school, an assembly room, a club house, canteen, sick bay and two shops. It is all gone now. The Lakes School stands on the site. Indeed, Shorts’ official records were lost in a fire, and beyond a handful of official photographs and the fading memories of those they employed, little evidence remains of their tenure here.

Short Sunderland Flying Boat
Short Sunderland (photo by Canadian Forces Expired crown copyright)

My thoughts drift to another war refugee whose journey also ended here. (Sometimes, life is like a length of rope where disparate threads intertwine in unexpected ways.)

When I first moved to the South Lakes, my wife, Sandy, worked at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Kendal. I was a frequent visitor, and one picture never failed to arrest my attention (it still does).  It’s a tiny collage called Mier Bitte by German artist, Kurt Schwitters. 

Schwitters was born in Hanover and trained at the Dresden Academy, but in the aftermath of the First World War, everything seemed chaotic and broken, and he felt conventional modes of expression had lost their relevance. He experimented, creating collages from found objects as a way of forging new meaning from the detritus of everyday life. It was a technique he called Merz. Mier Bitte is an example: it is named for the two German words in the top right-hand corner, often taken to mean, “to me, please”.  But the phrase only looks German. The collage was made here in Langdale, and the words are just the visible portion of a label, lifted from a bottle of Yorkshire Premier Bitter.

Mier Bitte, Kurt Schwitters
Mier bitte (1945-7), Kurt Schwitters, Abbot Hall Kendal

Some of Schwitters’ earlier works incorporated wheels that turned only to the right, a commentary on the drift in German politics that would turn his life upside down. 

During their reign of terror, the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Six million. That’s more than the entire population of Scotland. But Jews were not the only victims. Anyone who didn’t fit the Führer’s blueprint for the Aryan race was marked for extermination. Alongside Jews, the Nazis murdered gypsies, the mentally and physically disabled, homosexuals, political and religious dissidents. The total death toll is estimated at between nine and eleven million.

By 1937, Hitler’s ire had turned on modern artists; he denounced them as “incompetents, cheats and madmen”. There would be no room for their kind of degeneracy in the Reich. Between July and November, the Nazi party staged an exhibition of degenerate art in Munich, where confiscated items, including works by Schwitters, were hung upside down to be ridiculed and to demonstrate to the public what should no longer be tolerated. When the Gestapo ordered Schwitters to attend an interview, he fled to Norway, and when the Germans invaded Norway, he escaped to Britain.

After months in an internment camp, Schwitters moved to London, but he never really gelled with British art establishment. In 1942, he visited Lakeland and discovered a mountain landscape that could inspire him afresh. He moved to Ambleside in 1945 and rented an old stone barn near Elterwater from a landscape gardener friend, called Harry Pierce. This would be his studio, his Merz Barn. Happy at long last, Kurt would write to a friend, “Thanks to England, we live in an idyll, and that suits me just fine. England in particular is idyllic, romantic, more so than any other country.”

Studios were never just studios for Schwitters. Ideally, they were Merzbauten: works of art in their own right, with walls, corners, ceilings and floors transformed into installations. The Langdale Merz Barn was to be his third and final incarnation of this concept. He transformed an entire wall into a large abstract sculptural relief, but that’s as far as he got. Schwitters died in 1948.

After his death, the barn fell into disrepair, but the finished wall was rescued in the 1960’s by renowned British Pop artist, Richard Hamilton. It now hangs in the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle. The Merz Barn itself was acquired by the Littoral Arts Trust in 2005, but with the onset of austerity, they suffered funding cuts, and last year, newspapers reported that the Barn had been put up for sale. I’d always intended to visit; now, it seems, I’ve missed my chance. All the same, when I get back down to the valley, I’m going to look for it. At the very least, I might be able to glimpse it from the outside.

I start a spectacular descent along Lingmoor’s western ridge. The snow hasn’t made it down this far, but the higher fells are all white capped. A drystone wall protrudes like an emaciated spine from the hide of brown heather, dropping, twisting and curving with the contours. Crinkle Crags and Bowfell form an epic  backdrop, winter-shorn of green summer cloaks to reveal gaunt Alpine profiles; the chiselled countenance of Side Pike dominates the foreground—a precipitous dome of brutal black rock.

Lingmoor Fell and Side Pike
Lingmoor Fell and Side Pike
Langdale Pikes and Side Pike
Langdale Pikes and Side Pike
Side Pike
Side Pike

The bitter wind shows no mercy. I’m battered and blown about, glad of the wall as a buffer. Reaching the col with Side Pike, I skirt the cliff on the southern side, attain the western ridge, and climb up through the crags. From the summit, Langdale looks wild, windswept, yet in this unearthly light, every bit as romantic as Schwitters asserts. When I reach the Old Dungeon Ghyll Hotel, I retrieve my car and go in search of his studio.

Merz Barn

I hardly need the deductive powers of Sherlock Holmes to find it. Opposite the Lakes Hotel is a stone wall and recessed gateway that I must have passed a hundred times, my mind too full of mountains to notice the sign.  The heavy wooden gates are shut, but a small notice says “open”. 

Beyond the gate, a dirt path curves through a small copse to a stone barn I recognise from pictures. By the door, a slate plate bears the words, “Merz Barn, Kurt Schwitters, 1947”. There is some salvaged iron machinery, and an incongruous bay window. Propped against the wall is a sign that says, “AHUMBLESHELL”.

Merz Barn, Elterwater
Merz Barn, Elterwater
Merz Barn
Merz Barn

With the principal artwork long gone, you’d be forgiven for thinking a humble shell is all that remains. But the barn has been renovated from the dilapidated state it was in when the Trust acquired it. A full-size photograph of the Merz wall stands where the original once did, so your imagination isn’t taxed in picturing it.  A photographic portrait of Schwitters stares out from the corner—his expression animated, mischievous, eccentric. It’s easy to see why this place inspired him: it’s tranquil; somewhere to soothe the trauma of forced exile; somewhere to unfetter the mind and the let the muse take hold.

Merz Barn
Merz Barn

Director, Ian Hunter, comes over to greet me.  He tells me they are in the process of commissioning a replica of the Merz wall to replace the photograph. It sounds as if the scare stories about selling up were premature.  Before I can ask,  he’s guiding me to the smaller back room with the bay window.  He calls it the Cake Room—Schwitters had intended to use it as a café.

Merz Barn
Merz Barn

Here, they’ve staged a little exhibition to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Schwitters wasn’t Jewish, but he deeply empathised with the Jews’ plight. On one wall is a photograph of Hitler at the opening of the Degenerate Art Exhibition. Most of the space is devoted to the work of children, however, screen-grabs from episode 9 of Simon Schama’s Civilisations, which tells the story of Friedl Dicker Brandeis and the children of Theresienstadt. 

Theresienstadt was a concentration camp in Bohemia that acted as a staging post for the mass extermination centres like Auschwitz. Propaganda films portrayed it as a self-governing Jewish ghetto, where happy children played in the streets, and enjoyed pageants and sports days. But it was all a sham. As soon as the cameras stopped rolling, a brutal regime of beatings, hangings and shootings resumed; many more died of starvation and disease.

Friedl Brandeis was an art teacher. When she learned she was bound for Theresienstadt, she filled her suitcase with art materials. She spent the rest of her life surreptitiously teaching children to paint and to draw: to create better worlds into which their imaginations could escape. Brandeis was murdered at Auschwitz on 9th October 1944.  Seven months later, the Soviet army liberated Theresienstadt. When they searched the buildings, they discovered two suitcases she had hidden. They contained 4,500 pieces of art made by the children.

Friedl Dicker Brandeis
Friedl Dicker Brandeis

In Civilisations, Schama devotes time to these pictures, and the one that captivates him most is the one that holds my attention longest now. It is a striking collage of stylised white shapes—mountains and trees—mounted on a red background.  It’s the work of a young girl called Helena Mändl, and it absolutely belongs here in the Cake Room. For if you look closely at the shapes, they are cut from filing paper, replete with the remnants of columns and numbers—a discarded leaf from a ledger, perhaps. Helena has forged a landscape of liberty from the bureaucratic instruments used to administer her incarceration. Schwitters would have been proud. This is Merz.

Other paintings show boats on lakes and one depicts an open window looking out on to a mountainous terrain that could easily be Langdale. Helena didn’t survive. Very few of the children did. But for a handful, those dream landscapes were about to become a reality.

From Auschwitz to Ambleside

Seven months have passed since I visited the Merz Barn. I’m upstairs at Windermere library, viewing a small exhibition by photographer, Richard Kolker, entitled The Landscape of Auschwitz. There are no people in these monochrome shots, just the awful machinery of mass murder: a field of brick crematoria, arranged in neat rows, precise, orderly, like troops on a parade ground, cold, Teutonic, and ruthlessly efficient. The Spartan branches of leafless trees hang over railway tracks where the iron horses of the Reich carried train loads of innocents to their deaths. I’ve never been to Auschwitz, but I’ve been to Dachau, and these pictures evoke its memory: high wire fences and watchtowers; row upon row of soulless functional buildings, built for containment and execution. I remember a shower block. A large  communal room, designed to deprive its users of their dignity. They  would be herded in naked, like cattle, to be sanitised. Then the doors would lock. No water ever sprayed from the nozzles mounted in the ceiling. They were only disguised as a shower heads. This was a gas chamber.

Kolker’s pictures hang heavy with doleful atmosphere, the stifling weight of appalling memory. But if this room depicts the very worst the human race is capable of, the next room represents the best.

On the wall is a short piece written by curator, Trevor Avery. It recalls an exhibition at the Brewery Arts Centre, Kendal, in 2005 to mark the 60th anniversary of VE Day. One room was given over to Kolker’s pictures, but in another were photographs and information boards about the Flying Boats and the Calgarth Estate. It was in here that Trevor overheard two elderly gentlemen enthusiastically reminiscing about their time at Shorts. They were looking at an aerial photograph of the estate, recalling who had lived in each of the bungalows. Trevor starting chatting with them, enjoying their stories, then one of them astounded him by saying, “Of course, this is where the children from Auschwitz came.”

When the allied forces liberated the concentration camps, many of the surviving children were orphans with nowhere to go. Homes had to be found, and the British government offered to take a thousand.

On the banks of Windermere, production of the Flying Boats had ceased, and operations at White Cross were being wound up. Some of the married quarters at Calgarth were still occupied, but most of the single bungalows were free. With its school, sick bay and canteen, the estate was perfect. In August 1945, ten RAF Stirling bombers flew three hundred children from Prague to Crosby-on-Eden airfield near Carlisle. They were the survivors of Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. Buses brought them on to Calgarth which was to become their home for the next few months.

A couple of local newspapers carried the story, and the BBC wanted to make a documentary, but their carers thought it unwise. As such, it is a story little known until recently.

Since that chance conversation in 2005, Trevor Avery has devoted much effort to researching and curating the Auschwitz to Ambleside exhibition that now has a permanent home at Windermere library. Its centrepiece is a short film, narrated by Maxine Peak, in which four of those children, Minia Jay, Arek Hersh, Ben Helfgott and Jack Aizenberg, are reunited and revisit the lake to talk about their experiences

Minia explains how Josef Mengele (the Angel Of Death) devised a system to determine who would work and who would be sent to the gas chamber. She failed these assessments twice. It was only a shortage of transport that delayed her execution long enough for her to face a third. When the guards were distracted, she climbed a division and hid amongst the party that had been spared. Had she been caught, she’d have been shot.

Jewish Prisoners Arrive at Theresienstadt
Jewish Prisoners Arrive at Theresienstadt

Jack recounts a crushing cross country march from Colditz to Theresienstadt. It lasted days and they had almost nothing to eat. Anyone who lagged or weakened was shot and thrown in the ditch. They stopped at a bombed engineering works and scoured the building for food. Jack found a single dried pea. He wanted to boil it, but when he saw all the faces staring at him, he feared they might attack him, so he ate it dry, breaking it into four crumbs to make it last.

Child Survivors of Auschwitz
Child Survivors of Auschwitz

These survivors, now pensioners, describe their journey to Lakeland as a voyage from hell to paradise. They eulogise about the clean linen, the food, and the warmth and kindness they were shown. Minia recalls looking in wonder at the lake and the mountains, and someone shouting. “Good morning, beautiful day”, from their garden. Few of us will ever know just how beautiful that day was for her.

All four have gone on to lead successful lives, driven no doubt by the instincts that kept them out of the gas chambers. They all struggle to understand how they survived, but they draw strength from the fact that they have. Minia says she constantly reminds herself, “I am alive, and Hitler and Mengele are dead”.  Jack confesses he always stops in front of the frozen food section in the supermarket to look at the peas, acutely aware he could buy the whole freezer if he chose.

We live in troubling times. Far right groups are on the rise again, here, across Europe and in America. Thankfully, for now, they are fringe movements, given short shrift by ordinary decent people. Whatever our disagreements in the broad sphere of mainstream politics, we must unite in keeping it that way. In the words of Jo Cox (the Batley and Spen M.P. murdered by a man with psychiatric issues and links to an American neo-Nazi group), “we have far more in common than that which divides us.”

I feel proud that the Lake District played a small but pivotal role in changing the lives of these brave children, and I applaud the sterling work of Trevor Avery and the Lake District Holocaust Project in telling their story. It should be told. It deserves to be shouted from the roof tops. For theirs is a legacy not of hate, but of hope.

Windermere
Windermere

Exhibitions and Further Reading

Visit the Lake District Holocaust Project exhibition, “From Auschwitz to Ambleside” at Windermere library

Lake District Holocaust Project
Windermere Library
Ellerthwaite
Windermere
LA23 2AJ

Tel: 015394 88395

Website: http://ldhp.org.uk/

Visit the Merz Barn at:

The Merz Barn, Cylinders Estate, Langdale, Ambleside LA22 9JB

Telephone: 015394 37309

Website: https://merzbarnlangdale.wordpress.com/


    Enjoyed this post?

    Like to receive free email alerts when new posts are published?

    Leave your name and email and we'll keep you in the loop. This won't be more than once or twice a month. Alternatively, follow this blog on Facebook by "Liking" our page at https://www.facebook.com/lakelandwalkingtales

    Mountains and Margarine

    Bonington, Beatrix, Kurt & the Borrowdale Caveman

    Castle Crag in autumnal splendour and the museums of Keswick and Ambleside spark a train of thought about four Lakeland luminaries and the landscape that inspired them.

    Man vs Mountain

    The curator pops her head around the corner to say she’ll be shutting up the till in a couple of minutes—if there’s anything I want from the shop. She glances at the screen and adds, “you’ve got time to see it through to the end”. Then she smiles, and I wonder if she can tell that I’m fighting back tears.

    I dare say I’m not the first. I’m in Keswick museum, at the Man vs Mountain exhibition, watching a short film about Chris Bonington. Chris is recalling how he reached the summit of Everest for the first time at the age of fifty. The last difficult part of the climb is the Hillary Step. As Chris started up it, he began to doubt whether he still had the upper body strength required. All of a sudden, he sensed his old climbing buddy, Doug Scott beside him, offering words of encouragement and spurring him on. Whilst he was fully aware this was something his mind was constructing to help him dig deep, it worked: he found the resolve and his muscles didn’t fail.

    From the top of the Hillary Step onwards is relatively easy (apparently), but as Chris trod the snow in the footsteps of the others, his mind filled with memories of the friends he’d lost. Men like Ian Clough, with whom he conquered the north face of the Eiger. Their faces fill the screen, and Chris wells up as he remembers collapsing in tears on the roof of the world. You’d have to be harder than the Eiger and colder than the Hillary Step not to be moved.

    Ten minutes ago, he had me crying with laughter as he read out a letter from his former employer, refusing him leave to embark on a mountaineering expedition. Chris worked for a foodstuffs manufacturer and the letter has all the hallmarks of CJ giving Reggie Perrin a dressing down. His employer concluded that this request was hardly likely to be a one-off, and repeated absences for this sort of thing would almost certainly conflict with the young Bonington‘s career as a business executive. It was time he made a choice between mountains and margarine!

    For all his far-flung adventures since choosing summits over Sunshine Desserts, it’s Cumbria that Chris calls home. He has said of the Lake District, “It may not be the most beautiful place in the world, but it is as beautiful as any place in the world”. Of course, it’s Lakeland for a reason, and today, torrential rain has driven me indoors, but yesterday, the District more than lived up to such an accolade.

    Skiddaw from Castle Crag
    Skiddaw from Castle Crag

    The Professor of Adventure

    It’s autumn, “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, and twenty-four hours ago in Borrowdale, Keats’s words found their full expression. As I walked through the woods beside the River Derwent and climbed to the top of Castle Crag, the trees were in their majesty, robed in leaves of amber, honey, mustard and flaxen against the purple fell—a last parade of pomp before winter’s winds strip them bare. Swathes of undergrowth were fire brick and barn red. The quarry-cut faces of slate-grey escarpments thrust from the flora like stalagmites, aspiring to kiss the volatile sky—all wisps of smokey mist and darker banks of rain-cloud, punctuated with shafts of soft yellow light. Over Derwent Water, Blencathra’s crenelated ridge was pale sunlit gold.

    New Bridge over the Derwent
    New Bridge over the Derwent

    Derwent Water from Castle Crag
    Derwent Water from Castle Crag

    Castle Crag quarry
    Castle Crag quarry
    Blencathra over Derwent Water
    Blencathra over Derwent Water

    On the way to the summit, I stopped for coffee with the ghost of another Lakeland legend. A cave above a spoil heap, on the eastern slope of Castle Crag, was home to Millican Dalton. Like Bonington, Millican made a life-changing decision to quit his job as a London insurance clerk and live free, becoming a self-styled Professor of Adventure.

    Millican Dalton's Cave Entrance
    Millican Dalton’s Cave Entrance

    After selling his house, he overwintered in Buckinghamshire in a log cabin, but spent his summers in the Lakes, initially under canvas, but from around 1914, in this old quarry cavern. During WWII, when his Buckinghamshire home was a little too close to the Blitz, he spent the winter here too, obliged to put out his campfire at night at the behest of the blackout wardens.

    In his book, Millican Dalton: a Search for Romance and Freedom, M. D. Entwistle reproduces an interview from a January 1941 edition of the Whitehaven News. It helps paint a picture of the cave as it was in Millican’s time—pots and cooking utensils, salvaged from village dumps, packed neatly in their places, and huge icicles hanging from the entrance. Dalton himself cut a dashing figure in his Tyrolean hat and home-made clothes—lightweight, functional but never quite finished. This wildman of the woods was anything but reclusive. On the contrary, he was well-known and well-liked around Keswick and would trade climbing lessons and adventures for Woodbines and copies of the Daily Herald.

    Millican Dalton's Cave Entrance
    Millican Dalton’s Cave Entrance

    Where the path swings away from the River Derwent, it forks. The left-hand prong climbs below spoil to a shallow waterlogged cavern. A little way above is Dalton’s cave, a split-level affair with a larger lower chamber and an upper room which Millican called the attic. Here was where he slept. Yesterday, I sat on a stone shelf beside his bed, which had been given a fresh mattress of bracken—maintained, it seems, by an invisible devotee. It’s easy to imagine Millican’s presence; easier still, to understand the cave’s appeal. Water dripped hypnotically from the entrance, but the interior was dry. I stayed a good while in quiet meditation, soothed by a pervasive sense of calm.

    The attic
    The attic
    Millican Dalton's Cave
    Millican Dalton’s Cave

    I have a friend who is something of a modern day Millican. Like Dalton, he’s gregarious and works with people—that’s what makes him tick—but he loves the solitude of wilderness too. He has a house but only retreats within its walls for the worst of the winter. For the rest of the year he camps wild, moving his tent every two days to avoid leaving an imprint. His eyes sparkle as he describes the joy of living so close to the wildlife.

    People talk about getting close to nature as an escape, but when we’re out in the landscape, it feels much more as if we’re getting closer to reality—closer to who we really are. Modern living divorces us from the natural order and can fill us with all kinds of unnatural, trivial neuroses. The landscape restores a sense of belonging, but it also triggers a survival instinct: nature does not owe us safe passage; we must keep our wits about us; we will survive or fall by our judgements. The more challenging the terrain, the more intense that feeling. Ultimately, it’s more liberating than intimidating, because nature’s threats bear no malice, they’re just part of a system that, deep down, we fully understand. Bonington and Dalton simply took it to another level.

    Skiddaw over Derwent Water
    Skiddaw over Derwent Water

    Both men quit their regular jobs to do what inspired them. By contrast, Kurt Schwitters was forced out of his because of what inspired him. He would eventually find refuge, fresh hope and a new muse in Lakeland, but it took a circuitous route to get here.

    Mier Bitte

    Schwitters was born in Hanover and studied art at the Dresden Academy. In the chaos surrounding the First World War, he felt conventional modes of artistic expression were no longer relevant:

    “In the war, things were in terrible turmoil. What I had learned at the academy was of no use to me and the useful new ideas were still unready…. Everything had broken down and new things had to be made out of the fragments; and this is Merz. It was like a revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.” – The Collages of Kurt Schwitters, Dietrich, Cambridge University Press 1993

    Merz was a term coined by Schwitters to describe his technique of building ‘psychological collages’ from fragments of found objects: bus tickets, bits of wood, wire, newspaper cuttings. The pictures attempt to understand the world by assembling something new, witty, poignant or thought-provoking from its broken and discarded pieces. Mier Bitte hangs in Kendal’s Abbot Hall Art Gallery. It takes its name from the words that appear in the top right-hand corner, a corruption of the German for “me please”. Or is it? If you look closely enough, you can almost make out the letters that have been covered up—cut from an advert for Yorkshire Premier Bitter.

    Picture With Turning Wheel comprises a set of wheels that only turn clockwise—an allusion to right-wing drift in German politics that gained momentum between the wars. When the Nazis took power, Schwitters was denounced as a degenerate. He was relieved of his contract with Hanover City Council; his works were removed from public galleries and ridiculed. Kurt feared for his safety when the Gestapo summoned him for interview. He fled to Norway. His wife stayed behind to manage their properties and visited regularly at first, but eventually they became estranged.

    In 1940, the German army invaded Norway, and Schwitters escaped to Britain where he was interred on the Isle of Man. The camp was home to a number of artists and writers. Schwitters was a popular figure and a mentor to young creatives, but some accounts suggest he worked tirelessly to shut out depression. His internment ended in 1941, and he moved to London, where he would become a major influence on British Pop Artists like Peter Blake and Richard Hamilton, as well as their American forerunners, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

    In 1942, he visited the Lake District and found a volcanic landscape that reminded him of beloved Norway. He moved to Ambleside three years later and set up a studio in an old stone barn near Elterwater. Schwitters was a Merz artist and his studios were his Merzbau: more than just workshops, they were installations, transformed into works of art in their own right, walls, columns, ceilings becoming Merz sculptures. His original Hanover Merzbau was destroyed by Allied bombing, and his second in Norway burnt down. The Elterwater barn was the only survivor.

    After his death, Schwitters’ legacy languished, and for a while, he was largely overlooked. The barn fell into disrepair. Eventually the Tate Gallery and Richard Hamilton got involved and airlifted one sculptural relief, spanning an entire interior wall, to a new home in the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle.

    In recent years, Schwitters’ reputation has enjoyed a renaissance. In 2011, Lakeland builder, Mike Hodgson, was commissioned to build an exact replica of the Elterwater Merzbau in the forecourt of the Royal Academy—a reminder to the artistic establishment that the arts have flourished beyond the boundary of the M25.

    This morning, I visited the Armitt museum in Ambleside to see a small exhibition of Schwitters’ oil paintings. Schwitters never entirely abandoned what he learned at the Academy. He continued to produce figurative work alongside his Merz experiments, if only because these were easier to sell. This small collection comprises richly evocative pictures of Ambleside and the Lakes. Bold and expressive, the paint so thick it’s almost sculptural in its textures, these canvases take you deep into the landscape beyond the walls. This is the work of a man who understood this wild terrain: the rough fell pasture and the craggy pinnacles, the haunting light and the white rendered farm houses, the twisted wind-blown trees and the drama of brooding weather fronts. In the dramatic shadow play of late afternoon, light dimming, leaves blown in spirals by the brutal buffets of a bracing wind, a thin veil of mizzle softening focus, hard lines blur, blending building, tree, shrub, scrub and hill; in these paintings, Ambleside’s iconic Bridge House is organic, tree-like, growing from the foliage behind; the gables of a grand Grasmere residence are siblings to the crags of Silver How; and the shifting patterns of light unite lake, leaves and fell in one ephemeral sweep of green and white.

    Ruskin said, “Mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural landscape”. A pulmonary edema ended Schwitter’s life at the tender age of sixty, but he died in the shadow of the Lakeland fells: they had become a happy final refuge from the chaos and turmoil he strove to capture through Merz.

    In their own ways, Bonington, Dalton and Schwitters have all been champions of Lakeland, but in the adjacent room hangs the work of a woman, who may just have been the greatest champion of them all.

    Mrs Heelis

    The exhibition comprises a number of scientific drawings and watercolours of fungi. Painstakingly accurate, they have long served as a reference for the correct identification of species, but they are also exquisitely beautiful artworks. The artist was a woman and an amateur mycologist. The daughter of an eminent London lawyer and a socially ambitious mother, she may have seen scientific research as a way out of the rather straight-jacketed existence of a dutiful Victorian daughter—permitted a tightly circumscribed choice of activities until her mother could find a respectable match for her to marry.

    Her uncle was a distinguished chemist and arranged a meeting with George Murray, the Keeper of Botany at Kew Gardens. They struck up a friendship, but Murray remained sceptical about the woman’s theories on the nature of lichens. Her uncle attempted to go over Murray’s head by arranging a meeting with the director of Kew, William Thistleton-Dyer. It was not a great success—Thistleton-Dyer was dismissive and patronising.

    Undeterred, and with the help of her uncle and George Murray, the woman submitted a paper on “On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae” to the Linnean Society. At the time women were prohibited from attending Linnean Society meetings, so her paper was presented in her absence. By all accounts, it was well received, but the society felt it needed more work before they would agree to publish it. The changes were never made, and the paper was lost.

    There is some debate as to whether this was a case of a promising young mycologist being stifled by a misogynistic establishment, or whether an amateur with a slightly inflated view of her own work’s importance simply lost heart when confronted with legitimate demands for greater scientific rigour. Perhaps the paper simply got put on the back burner when the woman found a more fruitful path to freedom.

    She had enjoyed some success with her designs for greetings cards, featuring animals dressed in human clothing. In 1901, she developed the story of one such character into a book, which publisher, F. Warne, published to widespread success. Lovers of the Lakes must be thankful that the doors of the Linnean Society slid shut at the right time. If Beatrix Potter had forged a successful career as a mycologist, the Lake District might look very different today.

    Beatrix used the profits from her first book, The Tale Of Peter Rabbit, to buy Hill Top farm in Near Sawrey. It became the inspiration for several of her later, equally successful stories, but it also kickstarted her interest in farming and conservation.

    Stone barn in Troutbeck valley
    Stone barn in Troutbeck valley

    Much to the dismay of her mother, Potter married a humble Hawkshead solicitor, William Heelis. With William’s help, and motivated by the work of family friend and National Trust founder, Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley (once described as “the most active volcano in Europe”), Beatrix began buying and conserving other Lakeland farms, including the huge but run-down Troutbeck Park. The Heelises’ objective was to protect the land from the property developers who were quickly waking up to its commercial potential.

    Troutbeck Tongue
    Troutbeck Tongue
    Troutbeck Tongue over Troutbeck Park
    Troutbeck Tongue over Troutbeck Park

    Beatrix’s coup-de-grace came when the vast Monk Coniston estate was put up for sale. She realised this might be the writing on the wall for the traditional Lakeland fell farms that surrounded Coniston and Hawkshead. She petitioned the National Trust to buy the land and preserve it in the national interest. They lacked the funds to do so, so she made them a deal. If they bought half the estate, she would buy the other half, and she would manage it for them until her death, at which time, she would bequeath the Trust all her land. Without her intervention, the National Park, as we know it today, might not have been possible.

    As I drive out of Keswick under Skiddaw’s vaulting peaks, and journey beside the black primordial waters of Thirlmere, Grasmere, Rydal and Windermere, glinting inscrutably in the encroaching darkness, my mind is full of four Lakeland luminaries and the ancient landscape that inspired them. I may never climb Everest or live in a cave in Borrowdale. It’s unlikely I’ll be persecuted by fascists or facilitate the formation of a national park. But for many of us, the months ahead will hold their own challenges. As they loom on the horizon, some might even seem as insurmountable as Everest. To meet them head on may mean stepping far outside our comfort zones; but if I’ve learnt anything in the last two days, it’s don’t be afraid to fail; and always, choose mountains over margarine.


      Enjoyed this post?

      Like to receive free email alerts when new posts are published?

      Leave your name and email and we'll keep you in the loop. This won't be more than once or twice a month. Alternatively, follow this blog on Facebook by "Liking" our page at https://www.facebook.com/lakelandwalkingtales