Notable Works from the Interwar Years in Museums and Institutions

After World War I, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff entered a particularly productive creative period. Through the mid-1920s, he produced impressive paintings, many of which, however, were lost during World War II due to relocation, political turmoil, and destruction. The surviving paintings rank among the highlights of the artist’s oeuvre, many of which are located in renowned German and international museums, including the Kunstmuseum Bern, the Buchheim Museum in Bernried, the Brücke Museum, the Nationalgalerie, and the Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin, the Chemnitz Art Collections, the Museum Folkwang in Essen, the Kunstmuseum Gelsenkirchen, the Grand Rapids Art Museum (Michigan), the Kunsthalle Hamburg, the Sprengel Museum in Hanover, the Tate Gallery in London, the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, the Ernst von Siemens Art Foundation, Munich/Berlin, the LWL Museum of Art and Culture in Münster, and the Museum Wiesbaden.

In particular, the series of paintings depicting workers and artisans, created between the two world wars, is widely regarded as the most significant body of work from that period of his career.


Jershöft: Retreat and Source of Inspiration

Starting in 1920, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and his wife, Emy, traveled to Jershöft in East Pomerania for the first time; they returned every summer for the next 11 years, until 1931. Escaping the city's hustle and bustle, they enjoyed the silence and solitude, the simple life, and the vast, unspoiled nature of this village of about 300 inhabitants. Amid the upheavals of the time, the couple found time to “finally regain their composure” (Schmidt-Rottluff in a letter to the collector Ernst Beyersdorff, June 21, 1920, quoted from: Exhibition catalog Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Expressiv – magisch – fremd, Munich 2018, p. 27).

In addition to its peaceful tranquillity, the Pomeranian landscape soon became an indispensable source of inspiration for Schmidt-Rottluff: “This indescribable blue of the air is in itself a great refreshment, as are the clear, contrasting colors” (the artist in a letter to Ernst Beyersdorff, June 22, 1922, quoted from: ibid.).

Schmidt-Rottluff was working, among other things, on several expressive depictions of working people from various walks of life in Jershöft at that time—works for which no parallels can be found in contemporary German painting.

“The preferred motifs that defined Schmidt-Rottluff’s oeuvre until around 1924 can be traced back to his stays in Jershöft. Paintings depicting workers, farmers, or fishermen follow the prevailing trend to fuse the human, the social, and the spiritual. [...] Thus, the human being par excellence is captured going about his daily work, in the exercise of his profession.” (Magdalena M. Moeller, in: Magdalena M. Moeller, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Eine Monographie, Munich 2010, pp. 67ff.)

Schmidt-Rottluff explored the everyday physical labor of the fishermen living in Jershöft through watercolors, drawings, postcards, and paintings: fishing and angling in any weather, launching and landing boats, mending nets and smoking fish, rowing, towing, and rafting; he also created numerous depictions of the lives of farmers and artisans. The present painting, “Fischer auf der Düne,” is one of the stylistically representative masterpieces from the series Schmidt-Rottluff produced until the mid-1920s.


Rich colors, ample surface areas, and reduced forms: “Fishermen on the Dune”

His 1921 summer stay began in early June and ended on September 14, when he returned to Berlin. “Fishermen on the Dune” was created in light of those summer experiences. The artist merely observed the dynamic, multi-figure scene as a silent witness; most of the figures have their backs turned to him as they go about their work. Although the subject matter depicts the fishermen’s hard labor, Schmidt-Rottluff is fundamentally concerned with the composition—with forms emerging from bold colors—and with expressive painting.

The artist skillfully divides the pictorial space into three zones, each distinguished from the others by color: dunes, sand, and resting figures on the right; an active, dynamic zone depicting the fishermen at work, which he marks with a bold greenish-yellow and which extends diagonally from the lower left half of the painting to the upper right; and finally, the sea in a radiant blue. A few contours are rendered in black; the fishermen and the boat assume sculptural forms. The figures in the upper right and the lower left of the painting create an illusion of spatial depth.




Pure, rich colors of deep luminosity are juxtaposed. They interlock and lend rhythm to the painting's elements. The intense orange, the deep blue of the sea, and the luminous greenish-yellow of the water churned up by the boat create a powerful chromatic harmony. At times, the forms even seem to dissolve into the expanse of color, resulting in an almost chromatic abstraction.

“The monumentality that Kirchner believed he had already recognized in Schmidt-Rottluff’s early paintings created on Alsen in 1906, [...] is once again clearly evident in all of these works. Generous, reduced forms and large areas of color define the composition. [...] Within the boundaries defined by these areas, color takes on a life of its own. Time and again, the same hues are favored and blended into a harmonious whole: vivid blue, olive-colored ochre, and reddish-brown dominate. The figures and objects sometimes take on arbitrary forms that are heightened in their expressiveness [...]. [Schmidt-Rottluff] develops a colorful, surface-based style in his paintings of workers, artisans, and fishermen, which gives his art new impetus. [...] Schmidt-Rottluff achieves a high degree of formal and chromatic abstraction, yet he never loses touch with visible reality” (Magdalena M. Moeller, in: Magdalena M. Moeller, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. A Monograph, Munich 2010, p. 67ff.) [CH]