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Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - Stickendes Mädchen - image-1Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - Stickendes Mädchen - image-2Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - Stickendes Mädchen - image-3Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - Stickendes Mädchen - image-4

Lot 234 D

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - Stickendes Mädchen

Auction 1143 - overview Cologne
29.11.2019, 18:00 - Modern Art I
Estimate: 250.000 € - 350.000 €

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

Stickendes Mädchen
1909

Watercolour over chalk on yellowish card 66 x 46.8 cm Framed under glass. Signed and dated in black 'S. Rottluff 09' upper left and titled 'Stickendes Mädchen' in pencil verso. - Very vibrant colours.

In 1909, at the age of 25, the young Karl Schmidt-Rottluff created his first series of large-format watercolours during a stay of several months in Dangast: these works further advanced, summarised and developed stylistic tendencies from his painting up to that point. “Stickendes Mädchen” is also from this group of only a very few sheets that still exist today. It is among the artist's early expressionist masterpieces in this medium and, particularly in the broader context of the “Brücke”, which Schmidt-Rottluff co-founded in Dresden in 1905, it is a testament of modern art and the tremendous artistic revolution of this period.
Stylistically, Schmidt-Rottluff developed his own artistic path in 1908/1909 and, characteristically, he did so not directly within the group of his friends and fellow artists, but parallel to them. He had withdrawn to Dangast and rented a studio on the North Sea coast. Unfortunately, the majority of the paintings he created were lost in a fire there; as a result, precisely these phenomenal watercolour sheets from 1909, which he always felt were as significant as his paintings, really do provide an idea today of the power with which Schmidt-Rottluff then succeeded in pursuing an existing inspiration intuitively and unhindered. In this sense, these years have been discussed as the period of an initial and substantial artistic maturity. As late as 1939 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff would present Jawlensky with a pendant to the “Stickendes Mädchen” for his 75th birthday: the watercolour “Bei der Handarbeit”, which was also created in Dangast in 1909 (now in the Brücke-Museum Berlin, see comp. illus.).
Regarding the creation of this group of watercolours, Armin Zweite summarises: “Precisely in outstanding works - more so than in his paintings - Schmidt-Rottluff frees the objective world from everything that is static, he causes the material to melt, so to speak. However, the ephemerality of appearances is not an optical phenomenon. What is depicted is instead the artistic process, that is, the act of painting in watercolours, its motivations, impulses and formative powers emerging from the subject of the artist, for whom the outside world is no longer a binding goal to be made present artistically, but above all an occasion for giving expression to a feeling.” (Armin Zweite, “Das Erleben transzendentaler Dinge im Irdischen”. Schmidt-Rottluff als Mitglied der 'Brücke', in: Gunther Thiem/ Armin Zweite (eds.), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Retrospektive, exhib. cat. Kunsthalle Bremen/ Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich 1989, p. 34).

In terms of motifs, in Dangast Schmidt-Rottluff created dynamic landscapes, blue views of the harbour at Varel and also several still lifes, but above all a series of portraits (of Erich Heckel and Rosa Schapire) and other images of women in the form of half-length figures. It is telling that these are not “wild” Brücke nudes in the outdoors, but intimate snapshots of a personal, face-to-face encounter. Next to a sensational sheet like “Sonnenuntergang” (possibly another portrait of Rosa Schapire or of the Oldenburg painter Emma Ritter, reclining in a chair with her arms crossed above her head - now in the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf, see comp. illus.), there are images of young women with their head bowed, absorbed in their handiwork. These calm activities seem so quaintly Biedermeier to us today, but at that time they were a natural and everyday occupation for women, and they now unfold artistically in sheets that truly explode with colours. “The rhythm, the rush of the colours, that is what always mesmerises and occupies me”, Schmidt-Rottluff wrote to Gustav Schiefler in 1907 (cited in exhib. cat. Bremen/Munich, 1989, op. cit. p. 80).

The figure of the “Stickendes Mädchen” consists of a clear, radiant red, a blue, a yellow, a green - characteristically enriched with intermediate tones and a mediating, watery greenish yellow or olive and with everything applied using a full brush and in unhesitating and rapid movements, without any preliminary drawing. The half-length, frontal figure is entirely contained within the two-dimensionality of the sheet. The application of the watercolour is bound by lines, with restless streaks, broad zigzagging movements, a few parallel strokes and coloured contours, and it is supplemented through the deliberate insertion of local, deep-black points of emphasis. The light ground of the paper appears in the spaces left open between the impulsive gestures, and it provides the chromatic composition with a well-calculated contrast in brightness, which renders the effect of the colours more potent and gives them additional radiance. Schmidt-Rottluff had tried out similar effects on his early oil paintings, and it seems as though the watercolour technique had now become an ideal medium for him to paint in a free and liberating manner. He filled large sheets of paper experimenting with the possibilities and types of brushstroke, perhaps subsequently studying the effects of the colours and consequences of his rhythmic style of painting, comparing the results of transparency, colour and light - all forces for the absolute heightening of a pictorial effect that is inescapable and perhaps intended to produce an intoxication with colour.

Following his encounter with originals by Vincent van Gogh at the Galerie Ernst Arnold in Dresden in November of 1905, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff is said to have conclusively resolved to “cast aside” his studies of architecture in order to become a painter. He venerated Munch from a kind of respectful distance, he became friends with Emil Nolde, whom he visited on Als in 1906, and he was deeply impressed by his older colleague's “slithering storms of colour” and honoured him with his little self-portrait painted in thick brushstrokes. It is a chromatic modulation in complementary colours, which is still preserved today at the Nolde-Stiftung (see comp. illus.). Nolde encouraged him to occupy himself as an artist with nature and his sensations before nature. Looking back in his Brücke chronicle, Kirchner characterised the work of Schmidt-Rottluff as “monumental impressionism”. In a certain sense, this only applies to one of the tendencies in Schmidt-Rottluff's painting: his strong temperament, his vehemence, his love of nature and his joie de vivre.

Certificate

We would like to thank Christiane Remm for kind information; the watercolour is registered in the archive of the Karl und Emy Schmidt-Rottluff Stiftung, Brücke Museum Berlin.

Provenance

Galerie Wirnitzer, Berlin (acquired there in the late 1950s); Private collection, South Germany; Villa Grisebach, auction 53, Ausgewählte Werke, Berlin, 29 November 1996, lot 10; Private collection, Berlin