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Lot Essay
‘One evening (in June 1905) as we were walking home... Schmidt-Rottluff said we should call it “Brücke”. That was a many-layered word, and didn’t imply a programme, but in a sense implied going from one bank to the other. It was clear which bank we wanted to leave, but it was less certain where we wanted to end up.’
(Erich Heckel, quoted in U. Lorenz, Brücke, Cologne, 2008, p. 8)
Windiger Tag is an important early landscape by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff dating from the first years of the Brücke group’s maturity. It was painted in the summer of 1907 during Schmidt-Rottluff’s first sojourn to the fishing village of Dangast and was one of the first purchases of the group’s great supporters and patrons Paul and Martha Rauert, in whose family collection the work has remained ever since.
Depicting a blustery, windy day in the landscape around the North Sea coast near Oldenburg in Northern Germany, Windiger Tag presents the formal elements of nature as a panoply of bristling, shifting, angular brushstrokes of rich colour, all combining on the raw canvas to form a dynamic, energised surface of intense painterly activity. Executed directly in front of his subject, while standing in the landscape, this reflects the spontaneous and intuitive emotional response of the artist to the scene within which he was immersed. ‘Painting here,’ Schmidt-Rottluff was to write to Gustav Schiefler, ‘can actually mean only: surrender in the face of nature’ (K. Schmidt-Rottluff, ‘Letter to Gustav Schiefler, 1909’, quoted in U. Lorenz, op. cit., p. 62). Though somewhat impressionistic in its technique, in the intensity of Schmidt-Rottluff’s response to his subject in Windiger Tag, and in his encouragement of these responses to reflect his inner feeling towards the landscape that he was painting, Windiger Tag is one of the artist’s first truly expressionist works.
With its rich, shimmering style of swift brushmarks made in a thick impasto, Windiger Tag reflects two of the most important influences on Schmidt-Rottluff during the first years of Die Brücke: Vincent van Gogh and Emil Nolde. Schmidt-Rottluff, like all the members of Die Brücke, had come heavily under Van Gogh’s influence after seeing the Galerie Arnold exhibition of the Dutchman’s work in Dresden in 1905. In the summer of 1906, after successfully persuading the older artist Emil Nolde to join in their group enterprise, Schmidt-Rottluff spent several weeks painting with Nolde on the island of Alsen. During this summer, painting the rich colours and natural forms of Nolde’s spectacular garden in Alsen, Schmidt-Rottluff developed the rich, free-form style that moved beyond Impressionism and is also visible in Windiger Tag. Schmidt-Rottluff had especially admired what he described as the ‘colour storms’ of Nolde’s paintings and sought to emulate this approach in his own work. Nolde, on his part, seeing the expressive vigour with which Schmidt-Rottluff worked, told him that ‘you shouldn’t call yourself Brücke, but rather van Goghiana’ (quoted in ibid., p. 30).
Preferring to maintain his independence from the group rather than to follow in their collective experiments in attempting to develop a group style on their shared holidays to Moritzburg or the German coast, Schmidt-Rottluff adopted the village of Dangast on the North Sea as what he called his ‘silent home’ for the summer. He was to visit the area regularly every summer between 1907 and 1912. And it was there, amidst the unspoiled, marshy landscape of Jade Bay and its surroundings, that he forged out his own individual version of Brücke Expressionism. ‘The rhythm, the rustling of colours, that’s what always enthralls and occupies me,’ Schmidt-Rottluff said of Dangast in 1907 and nowhere is this feeling better expressed than in a painting like Windiger Tag (quoted in ibid p. 62). For this is a painting which, with its fluttering sense of movement and change, all articulated through angular brushstrokes of rich colour and coordinated into a cohesive whole, persuasively portrays a deep sense of the artist’s joy and excitement at being in the landscape. It is a picture that conveys an understanding of the artist’s captivation and physical and emotional immersion in this open environment, feeling the wind and the colours changing before him, while he intuitively translates these momentary impulses onto the canvas in a way that also carries a strong feeling of the fulfillment and medium-like sense of purpose that such a way of working provoked in him.
(Erich Heckel, quoted in U. Lorenz, Brücke, Cologne, 2008, p. 8)
Windiger Tag is an important early landscape by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff dating from the first years of the Brücke group’s maturity. It was painted in the summer of 1907 during Schmidt-Rottluff’s first sojourn to the fishing village of Dangast and was one of the first purchases of the group’s great supporters and patrons Paul and Martha Rauert, in whose family collection the work has remained ever since.
Depicting a blustery, windy day in the landscape around the North Sea coast near Oldenburg in Northern Germany, Windiger Tag presents the formal elements of nature as a panoply of bristling, shifting, angular brushstrokes of rich colour, all combining on the raw canvas to form a dynamic, energised surface of intense painterly activity. Executed directly in front of his subject, while standing in the landscape, this reflects the spontaneous and intuitive emotional response of the artist to the scene within which he was immersed. ‘Painting here,’ Schmidt-Rottluff was to write to Gustav Schiefler, ‘can actually mean only: surrender in the face of nature’ (K. Schmidt-Rottluff, ‘Letter to Gustav Schiefler, 1909’, quoted in U. Lorenz, op. cit., p. 62). Though somewhat impressionistic in its technique, in the intensity of Schmidt-Rottluff’s response to his subject in Windiger Tag, and in his encouragement of these responses to reflect his inner feeling towards the landscape that he was painting, Windiger Tag is one of the artist’s first truly expressionist works.
With its rich, shimmering style of swift brushmarks made in a thick impasto, Windiger Tag reflects two of the most important influences on Schmidt-Rottluff during the first years of Die Brücke: Vincent van Gogh and Emil Nolde. Schmidt-Rottluff, like all the members of Die Brücke, had come heavily under Van Gogh’s influence after seeing the Galerie Arnold exhibition of the Dutchman’s work in Dresden in 1905. In the summer of 1906, after successfully persuading the older artist Emil Nolde to join in their group enterprise, Schmidt-Rottluff spent several weeks painting with Nolde on the island of Alsen. During this summer, painting the rich colours and natural forms of Nolde’s spectacular garden in Alsen, Schmidt-Rottluff developed the rich, free-form style that moved beyond Impressionism and is also visible in Windiger Tag. Schmidt-Rottluff had especially admired what he described as the ‘colour storms’ of Nolde’s paintings and sought to emulate this approach in his own work. Nolde, on his part, seeing the expressive vigour with which Schmidt-Rottluff worked, told him that ‘you shouldn’t call yourself Brücke, but rather van Goghiana’ (quoted in ibid., p. 30).
Preferring to maintain his independence from the group rather than to follow in their collective experiments in attempting to develop a group style on their shared holidays to Moritzburg or the German coast, Schmidt-Rottluff adopted the village of Dangast on the North Sea as what he called his ‘silent home’ for the summer. He was to visit the area regularly every summer between 1907 and 1912. And it was there, amidst the unspoiled, marshy landscape of Jade Bay and its surroundings, that he forged out his own individual version of Brücke Expressionism. ‘The rhythm, the rustling of colours, that’s what always enthralls and occupies me,’ Schmidt-Rottluff said of Dangast in 1907 and nowhere is this feeling better expressed than in a painting like Windiger Tag (quoted in ibid p. 62). For this is a painting which, with its fluttering sense of movement and change, all articulated through angular brushstrokes of rich colour and coordinated into a cohesive whole, persuasively portrays a deep sense of the artist’s joy and excitement at being in the landscape. It is a picture that conveys an understanding of the artist’s captivation and physical and emotional immersion in this open environment, feeling the wind and the colours changing before him, while he intuitively translates these momentary impulses onto the canvas in a way that also carries a strong feeling of the fulfillment and medium-like sense of purpose that such a way of working provoked in him.