Lot 232 D

This charming late floral piece is characterised by its fluid watercolour technique and luminescence: the clusters of blossoms, which have only sparingly been modelled with the brush and which leave the tone of the paper visible, stand before a light and transparent, coloured background. The semi-abstract drawing inserted with an ink brush is characteristic and can be found in Schmidt-Rottluff's late watercolours, in still lifes and in landscape images: “The watercolours could also be defined as watercolour drawings; however, this would not be adequate in terms of their distinctive pictorial quality, because it is not merely a case of a simple colourism, but of the correspondence between coloured interior form and black contour. The interplay and interpenetration of both components is the integral means for the transformation of observed nature into artistic form. Schmidt-Rottluff developed his own language of signs for this. It is appropriate to speak of expressive signs; that applies both to the hieroglyphics that the artist finds for the internal formulation and formal encapsulation of things like flowers, masks, stones and pitchers as well as to the landscape.” (Eberhard Roters, Rückzug auf sich selbst - Ausweg ins Offene: Die späten Aquarelle, in: Magdalena M. Moeller (ed.), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Aquarelle, Stuttgart 1991, p. 37).