Revellers in bizarre fancy dress gathered beside Windermere on Saturday night to honour the legacy of the artist Kurt Schwitters and his absurdist Merz movement. Tango and Charleston lessons in Ambleside were followed by the first Dada/Merz ball. But behind the swinging dance music of the inter-war years, a sadder note rang out across the lake shore.
For the memory of Schwitters, the anti-fascist German artist who lived in the Lake District, has been dealt a serious blow. The celebrated Merz Barn that he set up 75 years ago on land next to the village of Elterwater, and which once won handsome support from the Arts Council of England, is to be sold. Despite recent donations from leading artists Bridget Riley, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst and Tacita Dean, the rustic art studio, which was to have become a landmark on a planned Schwitters trail, will be shut next month and is likely to be commercially developed.
Ian Hunter and Celia Larner, Schwitters devotees who have maintained and championed the barn since 2006, have finally given up their battle to preserve it for posterity. “It is a really shocking moment for us,” said Hunter. “This is such an important site, so valued by many artists, including the late architect Zaha Hadid. But we have run out of money and will have to put the whole estate up for sale in the new year.”
Schwitters’ subversive ideas, which sprang from Dada, the absurdist European school of art, went on to shape British art, rather like the work of his famous near-contemporaries, sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore. His use of found objects and rubbish to create collages and surprising imagery laid the foundations for both pop art and today’s thriving conceptual art scene.
Schwitters has never been commemorated on the same scale, although a bust of the artist was unveiled on Thursday outside Ambleside’s cultural museum, the Armitt, before the inaugural Merz ball on Saturday night. The artist once said it would take at least 60 years before the impact of his creative vision was widely understood.
Born in Hanover in 1887, Schwitters fled the Nazis in 1937 and then spent time in internment camps in Norway and Britain, eventually settling in Cumbria. Although never officially accepted into the Dada school in Berlin, his art drew on its anarchic attitudes. His own word for his art, “Merz”, was made up, just as the term Dada was.
He came up with the idea of a Merzbau, or art studio as an art object, in Germany a century ago. In the last months of his life he worked on the interior of his barn at Elterwater, which he saw as his final, grand contribution. He imagined it becoming a modernist cave, with artefacts embedded in the cement walls. Most of what he managed to complete before his death in 1948 is now on display in Newcastle’s Hatton Gallery.
Hunter and Larner, who jointly founded the Littoral Trust to safeguard the Merz Barn, say they have made nine substantial applications for renewed arts council funding over the last decade, each of which has been rejected, despite the support of prominent figures including broadcaster Melvyn Bragg and the former Conservative arts minister Ed Vaizey.
When the future of the structure began to look uncertain in 2014, Lord Bragg said he saw the Merz Barn as “an outstanding contribution to the understanding of contemporary art”. He added: “It has taken great care and work to bring it to fruition. To think that it will crumble away for the sake of a modest grant speaks very badly of the Arts Council’s priorities.”
Up until a few months ago, the trust hoped to protect the stone barn from private development and tried unsuccessfully to set up a consortium to buy the site for the public.
“This summer, we realised how tired we were,” explained Hunter. “I am 75 and Celia is 85. We have already sold our two homes in the area to fund maintenance of the barn and there is nothing else we can do. It was the Arts Council that originally encouraged us to take on the project, and they were generous with capital funds and with supporting our artistic programme. But they changed their minds and have not told us why.”
Last week, the barn was the venue for the final anti-fascist arts event inspired by Schwitters’s political stance. It marked the work of those artists who were persecuted as “degenerate” under the Nazi regime, and this year also commemorated the 600 children and mothers who died in the Russian bombing of the Art School in Mariupol in March.
“We have already had interest from lots of buyers who want to develop the land. The best we can do may be to set up a restrictive covenant which would hopefully preserve the barn from destruction,” said Hunter.
Arts Council England said: “We are aware that Littoral Arts has decided to sell the Merz Barn and we recognise the years of dedication that Ian and Celia have devoted to it. Given the passion and commitment they have shown to Schwitters’s work, this must have been a difficult decision for them.
“The project has received grants from the Arts Council in the past including investment in a feasibility study into the project. Understandably, there is a lot of competition for national lottery funding from the Arts Council and we’re not able to fund all of the projects that apply to us. Ian and Celia have been loyal custodians of the site and we wish them well in securing a future for it.”
