SCHMIDT-ROTTLUFF, Karl (Rottluff, 1884 – Berlin, 1976)
Karl Schmidt attended primary school in Chemnitz, near his native town, where he met Erich Heckel. In 1905, when he began studying architecture in Dresden, he met up again with Heckel at the Sächsische Technische Hochschule, where Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Fritz Bleyl were also studying. Together, they decided to form the group Brücke, a name suggested by Karl Schmidt, who began from then on to sign his works as “Karl Schmidt-Rottluff”.
Schmidt-Rottluff introduced his fellow artists to the lithography technique. In 1906 he visited Emil Nolde in Alsen, inviting him to join Die Brücke. However, Schmidt-Rottluff did not take part in Kirchner, Heckel and Pechstein’s summer trips to the Moritzburg lakes. He preferred to retire to Dangast, where he travelled for the first time in 1907, and which he visited in the following summers. His oeuvre from those years is composed of landscapes painted in bright colours and long brushstrokes with a thick impasto, following the example of Van Gogh. In 1910 he reached his initial artistic maturity, transforming his previous brushstrokes into large flat areas of colour. A year later, Schmidt-Rottluff moved from Dresden to Berlin, where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1912 he took part in the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne. There, he came across Cubism, which led him to experiment with the fragmentation of the human body into semi-abstract Cubist forms. His Cubist experiments soon gave way to works in which the flat colour is subordinated to forms built with angular outlines. In his portraits of 1914, there is also the clear influence of the black sculptures from Gabon and Cameroon, works which Schmidt-Rottluff had already studied in Dresden, and which inspired his sculptures made with blocks of wood dating from 1909–1910.
With the outbreak of World War I, Schmidt-Rottluff reduced his palette to predominantly dark shades. Similarly, his figures show extremely thin limbs, verging on deformity. In 1915 Schmidt-Rottluff was called up to fight on the eastern front, where he made woodcarvings and drawings. After the war, religious subjects were an important source of inspiration for his works. His art became from then on softer in its use of colour, without entirely losing the expressionist character of his earlier works. In 1918 Schmidt-Rottluff married Emy Frish, and in the 1920s he made several trips to Italy (1923 and 1930), France (1924) and Switzerland (1928 and 1929). With the coming to power of the Nazis, his art was declared degenerate. In 1933 he was dismissed from the Preußische Akademie der Künste, two years after being admitted. In 1938 the Nazis seized 608 of his works from German museums and in 1941 he was forbidden to paint. During World War II his atelier in Berlin was bombed, and a large number of his works were lost.
In 1946 Schmidt-Rottluff was made a freeman of the city of Chemnitz. A year later he was appointed professor at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in West Berlin. The last survivor of Brücke, Schmidt-Rottluff promoted the creation of the Brücke-Museum in 1967, donating 74 works from his collection. He died in Berlin on 10 August 1976.
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