Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl

born Karl Schmidt (1884-1976)

   artist; a leader in the Expressionist* movement whose sharply angular style is best rep-resented by his woodcuts. Born in the town of Rottluff bei Chemnitz, he adopted the name of his birthplace while attending Gymnasium. He accompanied Erich Heckel in 1905 to study architecture at Dresden's Technische Hochschule. To-gether with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Fritz Bleyl, the two students founded the avant-garde circle Brucke (Bridge). Initially aroused by neo-Impressionism and Jugendstil, the artists evolved their own style; for Schmidt-Rottluff, this included simplified forms and bright and contrasting colors. When the Brucke artists were excluded from a 1910 exhibition of the Berliner Sezession, they took the name Neue Sezession and arranged their own show; they all abandoned the Neue Sezession in 1912 when they surmised that the shows were being corrupted by less talented artists. Aided from 1911 by the patronage of Herwarth Walden,* Schmidt-Rottluff moved to Berlin,* where his art appeared regularly in Walden's periodical Der Sturm. Although he was developing a more definite palette in the two years before World War I, his attention, stimulated by religion and by an attraction to African wood sculpture, was increasingly devoted to woodcuts.

   Drafted, Schmidt-Rottluff served during 1914-1915 on the Eastern Front; the efforts of friends and admirers eventually gained his discharge. Returning to Berlin, he was haunted by his military experience and struggled for some time to regain his creativity. Drawn increasingly to religion and mysticism, he exe-cuted twenty woodcuts during 1917-1919 on New Testament themes: the well-known Christ and Road to Emmaus were completed in 1918. By the 1920s, when he resumed painting, his work had recovered an impressionistic gentleness.

   At the war's end Schmidt-Rottluff joined the Arbeitsrat fur Kunst.* He carved several of Bruno Taut's* architectural ideas, worked in 1919 with the Novem-bergruppe,* exhibited his work with Berlin's Freie Sezession (founded in 1913) and Dresden's Sezessiongruppe 1919, and was commissioned to redesign the imperial eagle to suit Germany's new republic (his casts were rejected). He promoted an end to the conflict between the fine and applied arts and also affirmed a faith in socialism; yet, distrusting politics, he avoided political in-volvement. His talent was belatedly recognized in 1931 with election to the Prussian Academy of Arts.

   The NSDAP seemed initially ambivalent about Schmidt-Rottluff; indeed, the National Socialist Students' League proclaimed him a "German Artist" in June 1933. But by year's end he was retired from the Prussian Academy. Despite escalating coercion, museums continued to show his work. Finally, in prepara-tion for the 1937 Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition—which featured 51 Schmidt-Rottluff works—the government prohibited either purchase or ex-hibition of his work. By 1938, 608 of his pieces had been confiscated. He was dismissed from the Reichskammer der bildenden Kunst in 1941 and was thereafter forbidden to work. After World War II he taught at Berlin's Institute for Fine Arts.

   REFERENCES:Barron, "Degenerate Art"; Long, German Expressionism; Selz, German Expressionist Painting.