Summary of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was one of the four founding members of the artistic group Die Brücke, a collective formed in Dresden in 1905. He and his colleagues - along with other artists in Munich and Vienna who together defined the multifaceted style known as German Expressionism - shared a desire to reject both the restrictive social conventions of the time and the traditional aesthetic conventions and academic training provided by art schools. Although the Brücke artists moved to Berlin and disbanded the group not long after, Schmidt-Rottluff maintained his avant-garde ideals throughout his career. He served during World War I, forced by circumstance and by trauma to reduce his output to woodcut prints, but enjoyed considerable success in the following years, when Expressionism became more widely accepted by collectors and museums. Schmidt-Rottluff was among those artists labelled "degenerate" by the Nazi regime, but after World War II, with renewed attention, he helped found a museum in Berlin dedicated to the work of the Brücke artists.
Accomplishments
- The goal of Schmidt-Rottluff and his Die Brücke colleagues was to create a new kind of art through the exploration of direct experience and emotion in nature and humanity. As he wrote in 1914, "I have no program, only the inner longing to grasp what I see and feel and to find the purest expression for it. I know I can approach these things only through art, rather than thoughts or words." To achieve this goal, he sought inspiration in the simplified forms of both European avant-garde and non-European art, and produced oil paintings, watercolors, prints, drawings, and sculptures.
- In the early part of his career, Schmidt-Rottluff was one of the most radical practitioners of woodcut printing, a medium his colleagues also took up. Learning from Japanese techniques along with those of artists including Albrecht Dürer, Paul Gauguin, and Edvard Munch, he produced powerful, highly simplified prints by letting the rough-hewn quality of the wood on which he created the image remain evident. This approach also informed his painting and came to characterize much of the Expressionist style.
- Having initially begun studying as an architecture student, Schmidt-Rottluff maintained his interest in three-dimensional form, producing wood carvings, decorative objects, and sculptures in wood and stone throughout his career. He also collected masks and sculpture from Africa. Much of his work reveals his exploration of the interrelations between two- and three-dimensional objects and decorative and representative forms.
Biography of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Karl Schmidt was born in Rottluff, a small town in eastern Germany where his father owned a mill (he added the name of his birthplace to his own name in 1906). As a child, he attended the Humanistische Gymnasium, a secondary school that focused on the classics, including the arts. There he met Erich Heckel, who was a year older. Their friendship flourished in the "Vulkan" club, their school's arts and debating society, where they had lively anti-bourgeois art and philosophy discussions. When Heckel left to study architecture at the Sächsische Technische Hochschule in Dresden in 1904, Schmidt-Rottluff followed him the year after, though he dropped out after one semester.
