Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

German artist

• Born: December 1, 1884
• Birthplace: Rottluff, Germany
• Died: August 10, 1976
• Place of death: West Berlin, West Germany (now Berlin, Germany)

The period 1905-1915 marked the beginning of twentieth century artistic principles. This was the decade of Die Brücke, an organized group of European artists and art lovers whose common interest was to encourage revolutionary methods of artistic expression. Schmidt-Rottluff, as a founding member of this influential group, maintained a lifelong dedication to its purposes.

Early Life

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (shmiht RAHT-lawf) was born Karl Schmidt. As a young man, he added “Rottluff” to his name, for the rural village, near Chemnitz (now Karl-Marx-Stadt), where he was born in 1884. Schmidt-Rottluff received his formal schooling between the years 1897 and 1905 at the gymnasium in Chemnitz. He was virtually self-taught as an artist, though he received some formal training in the art classes that he attended twice weekly at the Chemnitz Kunstverein. As a student, he demonstrated interests in poetry, music, and the humanities as well as in art.

In 1905, Schmidt-Rottluff became a student of architecture at the Technical College of Dresden. It was in the same year that he and three of his fellow students, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Fritz Bleyl, and Erich Heckel, decided to terminate their formal studies and seek free expression in painting. They were the founding members of a group known as Die Brücke (the bridge), so named by Schmidt-Rottluff because he wanted their label to symbolize that membership would bring together not only artists but also collectors, connoisseurs, and writers any and all who sought and appreciated fresh, new approaches to human expression.

The group of young artists painted, produced graphics, and occasionally sculpted wherever they could find space available at a price they could afford. Die Brücke produced an annual portfolio and sponsored group exhibitions of members’ works. By 1910, the group had reached its peak as an artists’ community. After that year, some members of the group moved to Berlin, where there was not the same degree of communal activity and cooperation. The year 1913 saw the dissolution of Die Brücke. Schmidt-Rottluff remained true to its goals, however, and attempted, in 1926, to start a new group, but his efforts were generally unsuccessful. The group and its spirit of community had been, for Schmidt-Rottluff, a most important part of his long, productive life as an artist.

Life’s Work

Schmidt-Rottluff had begun painting in oils as a high school student in Chemnitz, but he later wrote that he considered his first works to date from 1905, the year of Die Brücke’s creation. Erich Heckel, however, who was Schmidt-Rottluff’s lifetime friend, considered the earlier works to have been very worthwhile, especially as to the use of color. By 1904, Schmidt-Rottluff had begun experimenting with woodcuts, which proved to be, for Schmidt-Rottluff, a most appropriate means of describing the relationship of plane surfaces to one another. His first were impressionistic, but within a short time he had developed a more abstract style. It was his desire, as well as that of the entire Dresden group, to create in a manner that would be in contrast with that of the previous generation, for whom painting had virtually been abandoned in favor of what was termed “Art Nouveau,” the practical application of art. Die Brücke artists, in their youthful self-confidence, wished to preserve their naïveté and rejected the idea that to be an artist one must employ traditional techniques and skills.

In 1906, Schmidt-Rottluff extended, on behalf of Die Brücke, an invitation for membership to the artist Emil Nolde. Subsequently, Schmidt-Rottluff spent time with Nolde at his home on the North Sea island of Alsen. The wild, harsh landscape of the island had a great appeal for Schmidt-Rottluff, who loved the freedom of nature, and he began to develop a consistent need for isolated, outdoor environments in which to paint. An earlier van Gogh exhibition in Dresden had been seen by the artists of Die Brücke, and Schmidt-Rottluff’s painting began to reflect the influence of the Dutch artist, even though he would deny that he was able to put to any use the expressionism of van Gogh in what he, himself, was attempting. Nolde hoped he could help Schmidt-Rottluff to rely less heavily on the example of van Gogh. The effects of nature notwithstanding, Schmidt-Rottluff’s self-portrait of that year, with its heavy impasto brushstrokes, purposeful placement of contrasting colors colors not necessarily descriptive of the subject and the strong suggestion of movement in the painting, reflects a definite van Gogh influence.

Schmidt-Rottluff spent winters in Dresden, but in 1907 he made the first of what was to become an annual summer visit to the area of Oldenburg flanking the North Sea. Windy Day , a 1907 landscape, still reflects the van Gogh influence. It is considered a dominant work of Schmidt-Rottluff’s early period. In 1908, the artist spent the period from May until October in Oldenburg. The richly textured surface of that season’s Midday on the Moor , the intensity of color applied in broad, expressive brushstrokes, along with the resulting near absence of definition of subject continued to be reminiscent of van Gogh, though there was obviously an emerging individual style. A distinctive technique of the artist was to describe the subject in terms of its planes, sometimes emphasizing them by the use of black outlines. Schmidt-Rottluff’s work in these early years focused primarily on landscape painting.

Schmidt-Rottluff was one of Die Brücke’s members who exhibited in 1910 with the New Secession in Berlin. The group’s work received critical favor in Berlin, thus enhancing the emerging national reputation of the artists. Schmidt-Rottluff had been living in Hamburg in that year and had had a number of one-man shows in that city. The group’s Dresden show of that year had been a failure. It became desirable, if the artists were to maintain their newly earned status, to move to Berlin.

In 1912, in Berlin, Schmidt-Rottluff painted Houses at Night. This and other paintings of that period reflected the artist’s movement toward a form of expressionist abstraction. He rejected the idea, however, of totally nonrepresentational art. He began to utilize a more precise definition of subject matter. Figures and still lifes began to appear as subjects for his development of color planes, and his brief experiment with cubism is seen in The Pharisees of 1912. It was during the early years in Berlin that Schmidt-Rottluff’s work also reflected his exposure to the work of the Fauvists and to primitive African art. Meanwhile, Schmidt-Rottluff received wide exposure through his work published in Der Sturm, a Berlin weekly that promoted the new movements in art, and through his participation in several important exhibitions.

By 1914, Schmidt-Rottluff’s work became more somber, perhaps in anticipation of war. Typical works of this period contain figures that have, for the first time, human expression instead of figures absorbed by nature; his landscapes of this period also are more realistic in detail. Colors are dark, emphasizing the sadness reflected in the pictures. In the final months before he entered the military, Schmidt-Rottluff painted single figures with spiritual quality; these figures filled the entire picture. Portrait of a Girl is typical of this brief period.

During his three years of military service, Schmidt-Rottluff produced only woodcarvings and woodcuts, many having religious themes, including a series of nine woodcuts concerning the life of Jesus. After the war, his works contained symbolism as the dominant element, reflecting the internal personal changes that his experiences as a soldier in Russia had brought about. Titles of his postwar works included Stellar Prayer, Melancholy, and Conversations About Death.

Schmidt-Rottluff settled in Berlin after World War I, but during the next ten years he traveled widely, leading study groups to Italy, Paris, Dalmatia, and Ticino. Between 1936 and 1939, the first American exhibitions of his work were held. In 1931, he had become a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts, but, along with many German artists, was removed from academy membership during the Nazi regime. As many as 680 of Schmidt-Rottluff’s paintings were stripped from German gallery holdings during the twelve years of the Third Reich. Some were sold for cash; many were destroyed. In 1941, Adolf Hitler condemned Schmidt-Rottluff as one of the artists he considered decadent and therefore dangerous to the German culture. In that year, the artist was forbidden to create works of art in his own country.

After the close of World War II, in 1947 the artist, to pick up the pieces of his life, accepted a professorship at the Hochschule für Bildende, where he remained until his retirement. In 1974, the year of his ninetieth birthday, he was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American National Institute of Arts and Letters for his pioneering work in expressionist art. He died in West Berlin in 1976. Having no immediate heirs, his entire estate became part of the Karl and Emy Schmidt-Rottluff Foundation, which is in the custodial care of the Brück Museum. He had helped to establish the small museum in 1967 at a site in the Grunewald landscape of Berlin. It houses a collection of Die Brücke artists’ works that survived the purges of the Nazi regime.

Significance

Like most Die Brücke artists, Schmidt-Rottluff was, in the beginning, a provincial who was drawn to Dresden for professional training. He was perhaps awkward and ill-equipped as to city manners and social customs. However, he and his colleagues brought to the world an expression and an emotion stronger than that perhaps of any other art movement. Their dependence on one another for support was in part responsible for the rapid development of each member as an accomplished artist. Audacity, originality, and emotionalism were their contribution.

The courage of these artists who survived two wars and despicable treatment by the Nazis serves as an example to all artists and patrons of the arts. Schmidt-Rottluff, as one of the survivors, left to his country and to the entire world all that he had salvaged, to preserve for posterity the remaining evidence of an important movement in the arts. Of his work as an individual artist, his religious woodcuts are perhaps his most important and unique contribution.

Bibliography

Dube, Wolf-Dieter. The Expressionists. Translated by Mary Whittall. London: Thames & Hudson, 1972. Contains effective descriptions as well as plates of the artist’s work.

Grosshans, Henry. Hitler and the Artists. New York: Holmes & Meier, 1983. Schmidt-Rottluff is only one of the sixteen artists who are the subject of this work. The book is important, especially, because it provides a perspective of the artist in historical context as a contemporary and as a victim of Hitler, who considered himself the cultural leader of the German peoples.

Halasz, Piri. “German Expressionism, Explosive Art Movement in a Troubled Age.” Smithsonian, January, 1981, 88-95. This article describes German expressionism, its history, and its participants. Schmidt-Rottluff is placed within the movement.

Reidemeister, Leopold. The Brücke Museum. Translated by Margot Dembo and Edna McCowen. Fort Lee, N.J.: Penshurst Books, 1981. The author describes his contact with the artist and other members of Die Brücke and their successful establishment of a museum to house their works. Includes twenty-four plates of Schmidt-Rottluff’s works and English-language notes.

Selz, Peter. German Expressionist Painting. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. A comprehensive study of the expressionist movement. The artist is discussed as he relates both to Die Brücke and to his individual work. Contains extensive notes and a bibliography as well as plates.

Willett, John. Expressionism. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970. A broad overview of the movement and its history from 1900 to the date of publication. Covers the literature, music, and drama as well as the painters and graphic artists of the movement. Contains a discussion of each artist and works and of the sociocultural context.