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BACK
TO EXPRESSIONISTS
Double
Portrait S. and L.
Karl
Schmidt-Rottluff
Oil on Canvas 1925
Karl
Schmidt-Rottluff took an intence interest in African art,
particularly the masks and sculptures of the Gabon and Cameroon
cultures. Around 1914 this African influence became evident
in his painting. His double portrait of S. and L. reduced
the sitters to simple cubist shapes, much like the angular
African aesthetics he adored. Schmidt-Rottluff's works became
dark and forboding as the great war approached, and unlike
many other German artists at the time, he looked at the
looming disaster with dread. He was drafted in 1915, and
served in the army until 1918, when he turned almost exclusively
to the art of making woodcuts.
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impacted by the horror of war, he took to producing woodcuts with
Christian religious themes, where the suffering of Christ served
as a metaphor for the suffering of the people and of nations. Schmidt-Rottluff
took a very active part in the radical Arbeitsrat fur Kunst (Co-Operative
Council for Art), a political artist grouping founded in 1919 -
though his work did not reflect political concerns. In 1931 Schmidt
Rottluff became a member of the Prussian academy of the arts, but
in 1933 the Nazis removed him from his post, designating his work
as entartete kunst ("degenerate art"). In 1936 the artist was forbidden
to exhibit anywhere in Germany, and in 1937 some six hundred of
his works were removed from museums and hidden from public view.
When the Nazis held their infamous Entartete Kunst exhibit, 25 of
Schmidt-Rottluff's paintings were included. The artist died in Berlin
on August 10th, 1976. |
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