Search uncovers lost art works

Schwitters considered his last work his most important

Staff at the Armitt museum in Ambleside say a search for missing works by the painter Kurt Schwitters is beginning to have results.

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

He was so poor he sometimes sketched tourists for the price of a cup of coffee, and other paintings were sold in the street.

A week ago staff announced what they called a treasure hunt for missing works by the German Dada-ist.

They now say several possible works have been brought forward - and one is definitely a previously unknown painting by the artist.

Although he was largely unknown in his lifetime, he is now seen as almost as important as Picasso in the development of modern art.

Poverty-stricken

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.

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, backed 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.