After my visit to the Hatton Gallery on Wednesday, I checked the website for the Armitt Museum and discovered that today there was an annual guided walk in Ambleside of places significant to Schwitters, who lived there for the final three years of his life. It also gave me a chance to see what works of Schwitters the Armitt has. Plus other discoveries that caught my eye.

The walk’s focus was primarily on Ambleside and the people that Schwitters was friends with. He painted their portraits – competently if not inspiringly – and sketched and painted for a few shillings to earn a living. It wasn’t really the focus I was after, but nonetheless it was a pleasant and informative walk. There were wonderful views from the first house Schwitters lived in – but, after a fall on the icy pavement, he had to move. I learned that the Merzbau in Langdale was his third and final one, and the only one of which something remains – i.e. the barn wall in the Hatton Gallery. (His Hanover Merzbau was destroyed during the war, and the one he started to construct in Norway when he first fled Nazi Germany was destroyed decades ago.)

The Armitt exhibition was of Schwitters’ portraits of Ambleside worthies. It therefore gave little sense of what a very unusual artist he was. Nowadays Schwitters-type stuff and collages and deeply personal works are everywhere, but he was the ur installation artist*. (I did enjoy one of the group saying that her great aunt had had to clear out one of Schwitters’ rooms and found it full of rubbish . . . like old bus tickets! So not rubbish but artist’s materials.)

And then, since the day had turned into a beautiful afternoon, I walked back to Brockholes via bridleways – some with little rivulets running down them after so much rain.

* But levity will intrude and – unserious philistine that I am – I can’t always take his work seriously. So – Schwitters used porridge as a sculpting material while he was interned as an enemy alien; I’ve just read the following in “Conference at Cold Comfort Farm” (1949):

‘And Messe has promised, as you saw by the advance publicity I sent you, to do us a one-day show of Transitorist Craft work. Do you know his stuff? He won’t use materials lasting longer than one day, and he mostly works in pastry made from national flour, contemporary sausage-meat, and modern dyestuffs . . .’