Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (* December 1, 1884 in Rottluff; † August 10, 1976 in Berlin; real name Karl Schmidt) was a German painter, graphic artist and sculptor. He is considered a classic of Modern art and one of the most important representatives of Expressionism.
The painter, graphic artist and sculptor Karl Schmidt was born in Rottluff near Chemnitz in 1884, the son of a miller. In 1905, Schmidt-Rottluff began studying architecture at the Technical University in Dresden. There he met Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Fritz Bleyl, with whom he founded the artists' association "Die Brücke" in the same year. In his expressionist paintings, the painter lends the passionately applied and picture-determining color an intense luminosity and goes the furthest in the use of unmixed primary colors compared to his fellow artists.
When he moved to Berlin in 1911, he increasingly turned his attention to formal problems and developed an increasingly reduced, geometric formal language. The outbreak of war interrupted this development. During his military service, he created a cycle of religious woodcuts in which Schmidt-Rottluff dealt with the horrors of war and which is considered his main graphic work. He returned to Berlin in 1918.
In 1937, his art was defamed at the "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich, followed by a ban on painting and expulsion from the professional association in 1941. After the Second World War, Schmidt-Rottluff accepted a chair at the (West) Berlin Academy of Fine Arts. His late work follows on from the Expressionist phase in terms of motifs, but is more differentiated and less intense in terms of color. In 1956, he was awarded the Order "Pour le Mérite" as an innovator of art, as a revolutionary, and saw himself honored as a classic. In 1967, the Brücke Museum, founded on his initiative, opens in Berlin. Numerous exhibitions in the Federal Republic of Germany honor Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who is considered by art historians to be one of the most important representatives of German Expressionism.