Once a rising star of Germany’s avant-garde, Kurt Schwitters washed up in London in December 1941. He was poor, in bad health and virtually forgotten. Branded a degenerate artist by the Nazis, he had exiled himself first to Norway then Britain, enduring seventeen months interned as a so-called enemy alien at Hutchinson Camp on the Isle of Man, where he famously made sculptures from porridge and recited his Dada-esque poems to rapturous applause. But fellow internees thought little of the art he cared about most, especially his collages made from scraps of rubbish, which the poet, translator and critic Michael Hofmann has ranked among the few truly great, imperishable things of the twentieth-century.

In conversation with the Sohemian Society’s co-founder, Marc Glendening, writer Jennifer Potter tracks the highs and lows of Schwitters’ attempts to break into the capital’s art establishment before dying a pauper’s death in the Lake District. On his side were a youthful George Melly; the Belgian Surrealist E.L.T. Mesens; the art critic Herbert Read; the Hampstead modernists; and fellow émigrés such as writer and painter Fred Uhlman, and the larger-than-life Jack Bilbo, self-taught artist, impresario and legendary bohemian. Ranged against him were the likes of Kenneth Clark, then Director of the National Gallery, and public hostility towards German art.

‘The English people are konservativ,’ wrote Schwitters to a friend, ‘and don’t understand art at all.’


Jennifer Potter is the author of four published novels and seven works of non-fiction, all infused with a sense of place. Her latest is the genre-bending “Looking for Mr Schwitters”, published in June 2026 by the award-winning Little Toller Books. Fusing biography, memoir and art history, it delves into her lifelong obsession with the man and his art, sparked by a (misremembered) teenage encounter with the bus tickets in a Schwitters’ collage at an exhibition of his work in her native Lake District.

Marc Glendening is the co-founder of the Sohemian Society. His connection to Soho dates back to when, as a baby, he visited the Colony Room where his father, the painter Ronald Glendening, and his stepmother, onetime Sohemian Society stalwart Yvonne Glendening, were regulars.