The entrance to the Merz Barn Photo © Adam Lowe | Factum Foundation
The transfer of the Cylinders Estate to Factum Foundation represents a significant step towards preserving and promoting Kurt Schwitters’ legacy. Working with other local charities and universities, Factum Foundation will transform the site into a dynamic cultural hub to support the meaningful learning and interaction with Schwitters’ Merz art.
Part of the Merz Barn’s wall was relocated for preservation to Hatton Gallery in Newcastle in 1966 by the artist Richard Hamilton working with Fred Brooks and others. Using its experience recording and replicating artworks and cultural heritage sites, Factum Foundation proposes the reunification of Schwitters’ final installation by creating a facsimile of the missing wall section. In addition to the barn, the estate also includes a cluster of buildings that will be restored as a centre for artists and scholars passionate about Schwitters and his legacy. Factum Foundation aims to establish an annual residency programme for refugee and displaced artists, providing the kind of sanctuary that Schwitters found on the estate in the years before his death in 1948.
The cluster of the remaining buildings from the charcoal works at Cylinders © Adam Lowe | Factum Foundation
Kurt Schwitters and Harry Pierce
The Cylinders Estate, named because of its use as part of the Elterwater Gunpowder Works, is in one of the most beautiful parts of England, situated between Wordsworth’s Dove Cottage and Ruskin’s Brantwood. Factum Foundation London will be working with Grizedale Arts to revive the site as a place of pilgrimage and research into Schwitters and the garden designer Harry Pierce.
Pierce acquired the site in 1940. Schwitters painted his portrait in 1947, sparking a friendship between two very different characters: Schwitters, an impoverished German refugee, made collages from waste; Pierce was an established professional working alongside Thomas Hayton Mawson, a Windermere man and one of the great gardeners of the Edwardian period. While Pierce redesigned and built the garden at Cylinders around specimen trees, apples and weeds in an early example of ‘re-wilding’, Schwitters transformed a former storage barn on the Estate into his last great work of art.
(Left) The original map of the Elterwater Gunpowder Works, with the Cylinders Farm (right) on the top of the image. Marked in red, the land acquired by Littoral Trust in 2006 and now acquired by Factum Foundation.
A Refugee Artist: Schwitters and Merz
El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, 1925. Wikimedia Commons
Kurt Schwitters – an artist who created works from dispersed and fragmented material – led a life that was itself subject to fragmentation and displacement. On account of his flight from the Nazi regime, he worked in Germany, Norway, and Britain, with major holdings of his artworks also located in the United States.
Factum’s ambition to reconstruct Schwitters’ legacy has been evident since a 2009 project to create a facsimile of the Schwittershytte, built in one half of a potato shed on the island of Hjertøya, Norway, in the summer of 1934. This facsimile is now in the Henie Onstad Art Centre near Oslo. The Hjertøya ‘merz’ was built in parallel with Schwitters’ greatest work – the Merzbau (bau: building) that he constructed from 1923 at his house in Hannover and which he named ‘the Cathedral of Erotic Misery’.
The concept of ‘Merz’ was developed in 1918 and is thought to derive from an early collage with a fragment from an advertisement containing the word ‘Kommerz’ (commerce). However, considering the death of Schwitters’ son in 1916 and the trauma of the First World War, it also resonates with other German words such as ‘schmerzen’ (to hurt). The Hanover Merzbau was visited by Schwitters’ American patron Katherine Dreier, who had first exhibited his work in the United States alongside Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp. In 1929 she visited Hanover again with Duchamp. The link between Duchamp and Schwitters will be developed as work to bring the Merz Barn back to life develops.
Following increasing hostility from the Nazi authorities, leading to his inclusion in the Degenerate Art exhibition, Schwitters fled Germany in 1937. The Merzbau was tragically destroyed during the Allied bombing campaign in October 1943, which Schwitters only learnt of after the war, prompting him to embark on the Merz Barn. This was only possible due to a donation of $3000 from MoMA in New York. The Merz Barn is dismembered in two senses: the removal of the installation from its original setting, and in its being the last in a series of lost predecessors.
The Merz Barn wall photographed by Schwitters’ son Ernst after his father’s death © Photo courtesy of the Kurt und Ernst Schwitters Archive, Sprengel Museum, Hanover
Richard Hamilton and the relocation of the Merz Barn wall
In 2007-2008, artist Richard Hamilton encouraged Adam Lowe, founder of Factum Foundation, to make a facsimile of the wall in the Hatton Gallery (University of Newcastle) and install it in the original Merz Barn at Cylinders. When Hamilton removed the wall from the Merzbarn he originally wanted it to go to the Tate Gallery. The Tate accepted Hamilton’s facsimile of Duchamp’s Large Glass, but Schwitters’ Merz was declined and it is now part of the Hatton Gallery’s permanent collection.
The removal in 1966 was an act of preservation which changed the context of the original object. In the intervening years, Schwitters’ reputation has grown as a shift towards installation and performance brought his work into focus. Schwitters work as a graphic designer is now widely acknowledged and his legacy has inspired many artists. The seminal influence of the Merz Barn was recognised in a reconstruction (of the exterior of the building) in the courtyard of the Royal Academy for the major survey exhibition Modern British Sculpture (2011). In another homage to Schwitters, William Kentridge recently re-performed his great sound composition, the Ursonate.
The Merz Barn prefigures many of today’s issues, while offering a different perspective on the role of the artist. Just over a century after the commencement of Schwitters’ first Merzbau, it is now time to focus on his last major site-specific work – the Merz Barn wall. With war in Europe and attacks on immigrants and refugees, the Cylinders Estate is a resonant location for the perseverance of art in the face of conflict. The Cylinders Merz is an act of defiance by a refugee artist at the end of his life. His creative determination continues to inspire: It was made in a remote rural location, but it deserves to be a centre of attention.
Paul Thirkell, Derek Pullen, Steve Hoskins, and Adam Lowe viewing the Schwitters Merz Barn installation in the Hatton Gallery, April 2007 © Ian Hunter, Littoral Trust
From Littoral Trust to Factum Foundation London
Littoral Trust, run by Ian Hunter (1947 – 2023) and Celia Larner, which had worked to preserve the site since 1998, contacted Factum Foundation in 2023 to request its assistance in taking the Merz Barn and Cylinders Estate forward for a new generation. They had first contacted Factum Foundation in 2008 to make a facsimile of the work in its current form in the Hatton Gallery and put it back into its intended site at Cylinders.
As a Charitable Incorporated Organisation, Factum Foundation London is actively seeking a new model for this unique rural site. It needs local support from those who care about the Lake District and artists of singularity and originality. Success will be measured by the ability to convey the importance of the legacy Schwitters left as a refugee who contributed to a fundamental change to cultural life in England.
Factum Foundation seeks to develop a new approach to heritage management and will need support from philanthropic individuals, institutions, government agencies and artists. Littoral Trust benefited from the generosity of artists including Damian Hirst, Anthony Gormley and the Boyle Family. Many more will now be needed to make this vision of the site a reality. Since its creation in 2009, Factum Foundation’s core mission has been to preserve the past, empower the present, and inspire the future, preserving cultural heritage for future generations. The transfer of the Cylinders Estate to Factum Foundation represents a significant step towards preserving and promoting Kurt Schwitters’ legacy.
Through careful conservation and thoughtful programming, the Merz Barn is poised to become a vibrant centre of artistic activity and cultural exchange, honouring Schwitters’ innovative spirit and enduring influence on contemporary art. Working with other local charities, including Grizedale Arts, Factum Foundation aims to transform the site into a place of tranquillity, refuge, reflection and learning in celebration of a great artist whose cultural influence is growing and is more relevant than ever.
Factum Foundation’s work at Cylinders will be judged on the impact it makes locally, the transformation of the garden, the revival of interest in Kurt Schwitters unique creativity and on the depth of experience of those who visit.
