Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

It can be assumed that the artist himself spent the turn of the year 1915-1916 on the Eastern Front. From 1915 to 1918, Schmidt-Rottluff was deployed in Lithuania and Russia as an armoured soldier, i.e. he worked on the fortifications of the front. In view of the course of the war on the Eastern Front, which, starting with the so-called "New Year's Battle" in the winter of 1915/16, developed more and more into a war of position, the New Year at that time did not seem to have anything happy in store for the world, let alone for the soldiers on front-line duty.

It is all the more astonishing for us today that Expressionist artists were often able to continue to create artistically during their deployment to the front, admittedly not in a large pictorial format, but on a small scale, often with the means of graphic art. We do not know exactly when and where Schmidt-Rottluff made a preliminary drawing for the woodcut or the printing block itself. What is known, however, is that after the war in 1919 he was able to publish the motif as an original print together with other woodcuts in a newly published magazine called Genius.

Since 1911/12, Schmidt-Rottluff's preoccupation with woodcarving had had a decisive influence on his stylistic development. In the surface-emphasised design of the woman's head, we can see what he was concerned with in his woodcuts: a reduced, distinctive facial drawing to heighten the pictorial expressiveness and a concentration on quasi-geometric basic forms - stylistic elements that Schmidt-Rottluff associated with African wood sculpture, by which he was fascinated.

Gabriele Rauschning only owned this one work by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, which she acquired in 2004. Within the collection, the expressive woman's head corresponds well with a number of other depictions of women by the Brücke artists Heckel, Pechstein and Kirchner.

(Text: Verena Faber)