Lot 60 D

This sheet shows a bridge across the Łeba river and thus a typical landscape from Eastern Pomerania, where Karl Schmidt-Rottluff repeatedly withdrew for his summer holidays between 1932 and 1943. He stayed in Rumke on Łebsko Lake, a place that he liked very much due to its solitude and pristine quality. With a secure sense for a charged composition and a balanced colour scheme, he has created a vibrant landscape featuring a bridge that runs parallel to the bottom edge of the picture, reaching across a gently flowing river or canal. To the left and right, he has placed simple rowing boats with one figure done in blue and another in yellow. Behind the bridge rises a dense forest which he has rapidly depicted using heavily diluted dark and light green.
In the early 1930s Schmidt-Rottluff was already among his generation’s most renowned painters. When the Nazis gained power, it put a sudden end to this early fame. From 1933 he had hardly any more opportunities to exhibit and his works became attacked in the fiercest manner. Insofar, the present watercolour was among the few works at all to be created in 1934.