Editing Kurt Schwitters (section)

===The Lake District===
[[File:ForKate.jpg|thumb|left|''For Käte'', 1947 Private Collection]]

Schwitters first visited the [[Lake District]] on holiday with Edith Thomas in September 1942. He moved there permanently on 26 June 1945, to 2 Gale Crescent [[Ambleside]]. However, after another stroke in February of the following year and further illness, he and Edith moved to a more easily accessible house at 4 Millans Park.

During his time in Ambleside Schwitters created a sequence of proto-[[pop art]] pictures, such as ''For Käte'', 1947, after the encouragement from his friend, [[Kate Steinitz|Käte Steinitz]]. Having emigrated to the United States in 1936, Steinitz sent Schwitters letters describing life in the emerging consumer society, and wrapped the letters in pages of comics to give a flavour of the new world, which she encouraged Schwitters to 'Merz'.<ref>In The Beginning Was Merz, Meyer-Buser, Orchard, Hatje Kantz, p. 292</ref>

In March 1947, Schwitters decided to recreate the Merzbau and found a suitable location in a barn at Cylinders Farm, [[Elterwater]], which was owned by Harry Pierce, whose portrait Schwitters had been commissioned to paint. Having been forced by a lack of other income to paint portraits and popularist landscape pictures suitable for sale to the local residents and tourists, Schwitters received notification shortly before his 60th birthday that he had been awarded a £1,000 fellowship to be transferred to him via the [[Museum of Modern Art]] in New York City in order to enable him to repair or re-create his previous Merz constructions in Germany or Norway.<ref>See Adrian Sudhalter,[http://sprengel-museum.de/bilderarchiv/sprengel_deutsch/downloaddokumente/pdf/ks2007_sudhalter_schwitters_and_moma.pdf Kurt Schwitters and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 2007] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304064352/http://sprengel-museum.de/bilderarchiv/sprengel_deutsch/downloaddokumente/pdf/ks2007_sudhalter_schwitters_and_moma.pdf |date=4 March 2016 }}</ref> Instead he used it for the "Merzbarn" in Elterwater. Schwitters worked on the Merzbarn daily, travelling the five miles between his home and the barn, except for when illness kept him away. On 7 January 1948 he received the news that he had been granted British citizenship. The following day, on 8 January, Schwitters died from acute [[pulmonary edema]] and [[myocarditis]], in [[Kendal]] Hospital.

He was buried on 10 January at [[St Mary's Church, Ambleside]]. His grave was unmarked until 1966 when a stone was erected with the inscription ''Kurt Schwitters – Creator of Merz''. The stone remains as a memorial even though his body was disinterred and reburied in the {{Interlanguage link multi|Stadtfriedhof Engesohde|de}} in [[Hanover]] in 1970, the grave being marked with a marble copy of his 1929 sculpture ''Die Herbstzeitlose''.