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Lot Essay
Painted in the summer of 1913, when Schmidt-Rottluff was at the very height of his career, Leuchturm an der Ostsee depicts the outskirts of the small fishing village of Nidden on the Baltic coast with its celebrated lighthouse highlighted in the distance.
Schmidt-Rottluff spent the summer of 1913 in Nidden with Max Pechstein. Marking the beginning of a period of intense creativity, his paintings of this period mark a new departure in his art, distinguished by the heavy influence of African sculpture on his work. In Nidden, for the first time, Schmidt-Rottluff began to paint the nude in a landscape, a theme characteristic of his fellow Brücke artists' work at the Moritzburg Lakes. Like the Moritzburg paintings, the forms of both the figures and the landscape clearly begin to mimic and echo one another. Submitting to a bold and universal reduction of form and detail to the barest of essentials, each shape in Schmidt-Rottluff's paintings became simplified into a harsh, angular and almost cubist simplicity of form, which echoes the highly reductive nature and sharp angularity of African tribal carving.
In Leuchturm an der Ostsee, one of the finest of a series of figure less landscapes that Schmidt-Rottluff painted at this time, the same reduction of form is used to infuse a simple landscape scene with both drama and expression. Sharpening the angles of what is a fairly classical landscape scene, and reducing the colours to a series of virtually flat planes of simple primary colour, Schmidt-Rottluff creates a powerful portrait of this seaside landscape with the minimum of painterly means. In doing so, the physical act of his painting, the action and form of each clearly definable brush-stroke, becomes an integral part of the work in precisely the same way that the dramatic marks of the axe-blade's incision into the wood is an integral part of the surface of carved African sculpture.
What is remarkable about Leuchturm an der Ostsee, however, is the mastery with which Schmidt-Rottluff controls and orchestrates these elements and combines them into a believable and harmonious whole. Using long, swift and bold brushstrokes the surface of the canvas is endowed with an energy and vitality that echoes the living nature of the scene. At the same time, without resorting to the techniques of aerial perspective, the remarkably compact composition is constructed in such a way that a convincing sense of depth is conveyed despite the artist's use of brilliant colour in all areas of the canvas. These features endow the whole work with a remarkable sense of freshness and vitality that reinforces the Brücke artists' insistence on directness and spontaneity as the key principles of artistic creation.
Schmidt-Rottluff spent the summer of 1913 in Nidden with Max Pechstein. Marking the beginning of a period of intense creativity, his paintings of this period mark a new departure in his art, distinguished by the heavy influence of African sculpture on his work. In Nidden, for the first time, Schmidt-Rottluff began to paint the nude in a landscape, a theme characteristic of his fellow Brücke artists' work at the Moritzburg Lakes. Like the Moritzburg paintings, the forms of both the figures and the landscape clearly begin to mimic and echo one another. Submitting to a bold and universal reduction of form and detail to the barest of essentials, each shape in Schmidt-Rottluff's paintings became simplified into a harsh, angular and almost cubist simplicity of form, which echoes the highly reductive nature and sharp angularity of African tribal carving.
In Leuchturm an der Ostsee, one of the finest of a series of figure less landscapes that Schmidt-Rottluff painted at this time, the same reduction of form is used to infuse a simple landscape scene with both drama and expression. Sharpening the angles of what is a fairly classical landscape scene, and reducing the colours to a series of virtually flat planes of simple primary colour, Schmidt-Rottluff creates a powerful portrait of this seaside landscape with the minimum of painterly means. In doing so, the physical act of his painting, the action and form of each clearly definable brush-stroke, becomes an integral part of the work in precisely the same way that the dramatic marks of the axe-blade's incision into the wood is an integral part of the surface of carved African sculpture.
What is remarkable about Leuchturm an der Ostsee, however, is the mastery with which Schmidt-Rottluff controls and orchestrates these elements and combines them into a believable and harmonious whole. Using long, swift and bold brushstrokes the surface of the canvas is endowed with an energy and vitality that echoes the living nature of the scene. At the same time, without resorting to the techniques of aerial perspective, the remarkably compact composition is constructed in such a way that a convincing sense of depth is conveyed despite the artist's use of brilliant colour in all areas of the canvas. These features endow the whole work with a remarkable sense of freshness and vitality that reinforces the Brücke artists' insistence on directness and spontaneity as the key principles of artistic creation.