Search for art great's lost works

Schwitters considered his last work his most important

Staff at a Cumbria museum say valuable paintings by artist Kurt Schwitters could be gathering dust in houses across the Lake District.

He sold portraits and collages for only a few pounds when he lived in the Lake District, for the three years before he died in 1948.

He was not well known then, but he is now seen as almost as important as Picasso in the development of modern art.

On Tuesday, the Armitt Museum in Ambleside started a search for forgotten works by the German Dada-ist.

Peter Jackson, chairman of the Armitt, said: "We know that they are out there lying in garages and lofts, there is certainly a large amount of stuff we know he did."

Schwitters' first known collage was labelled Hansi and soon afterwards he started making works from scraps of rubbish, including one he called the Merz picture.

After this he referred to all his avant-garde work as Merz.

'Very ill'

Schwitters fled Nazi Germany in 1937 and arrived in the UK in 1941, and was placed in an internment camp as an "enemy alien" until 1945.

In 1945 he moved with his partner, Edith Thomas, to Ambleside, where, financed by the Museum of Modern Art (Moma) in New York, he started on a new Merzbau that came to be known as the Merz Barn.

He considered this his most important work, but at his death he had completed only one wall, now to be found in Newcastle University.

He died at the age of 60, poverty-stricken and ignored.

His biographer Gwendolyn Webster said: "He was very ill when he was in Ambleside but was desperate to finish his last project.

"He sold paintings and portraits for £3 or £4, or would sketch people for a cup of coffee. His avant-garde work was not popular in Ambleside."