A Year With Kurt Schwitters 2021-2022

In 2021-2022 award winning artist Anthony D Padgett created over 50 artworks in response to International artist Kurt Schwitters who spent his final year in the Lake District, England.

Schwitters is well know for his "Merz" collage art which used discarded items. Padgett explores this and also how Schwitters rose to fame through his Dada poetry, and how he was on the Romantic and expressionist side of Dadaism and Constructivist. This, coupled with his love of poetry and landscape painting, linked him to the Lake District and the tradition of William Wordsworth.

Said Anthony "I have really enjoyed creating artworks around Schwitters and am keen to share some insights into the man. He was a polymath who combined art, poetry, typography, architecture and performance. It means there is plenty of scope to explore and make something really interesting and original."

"A Year with Kurt Schwitters" was launched at the historic family home of Wordsworth at the Rydal Mount Spring Fair May 2022. It continued with an exhibition at Ambleside Library in June, and Kendal Library in September. He showed new painting, collage, sculpture and poetry and his collection of rare Schwitters books.

As well as images of his work this book contains a copy of his Artist's Talk "The Romantic Art & Poetry of Kurt Schwitters".

The culmination of the "year" was a "Dada Merz Ball" at St Mary's Civic Hall (Ambleside) in October. Schwitters loved to dance and Padgett will be teaching 1920s Tango and Charleston in the day. There will be live music from the High Society Jazz Band.

Schwitters was originally buried in the graveyard of this church before being exhumed and reburied in Hanover in 1970.

The will also be a very special unveiling in Ambleside of his bust of Schwitters to mark the project.