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Lot Essay
"In Schmidt-Rottluff’s work, something of his expressive, flat style remains, even in his postwar paintings. The sky is a wall, and its color does not signify distance, but rather pictorial construction; earthy browns are occasionally projected into spaces of light, while an ethereal blue is shone onto the earth. The plumes of a cloud have the same reality as the river within which it is reflected. The materiality of people and things is not excluded from the general pictorial idea, but it also doesn’t manifest itself in its usual form, but rather serves the fulfilment of the picture’s overall design. Reality and art have always encountered each other in what we call ‘translucency’: in what contains the conception of reality as well as the painter's method of capturing and conveying it" (W. Grohmann, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Stuttgart, 1956, p. 102).
Painted in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, circa 1918, Harzlandschaft (Harz Landscape) is a magnificent, vibrant landscape in which Schmidt-Rottluff depicts an idyllic scene in the Harz mountains of Northern Germany as a harmonious and holistic pictorial construction of color and form. The painting is one of a series of important works, made by Schmidt-Rottluff at this time that have come to be called ‘numinous paintings’ on account of their abstracted use of the intersecting of flat form and radiant color to convey an almost spiritual sense of a universal harmony and order at work in the world.
In 1918 Schmidt-Rottluff had returned to Germany after several years of military service in Lithuania, where he had both fought at the front and, at times, been able to further develop his art. There, as he frequently reported home, he had become enamored of the Russian landscape, even writing in one postcard, ‘If I linger in Russia much longer, all my patriotism and German pride are in danger of being destroyed - I like the Russian landscape with its great Slavic dreaminess too much.’ (Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, ‘Field postcard, July 4, 1915’ quoted in Schmidt Rottluff: Retrospektive, exh. cat., Bremen, 1989, p. 86)
On his return to Germany Schmidt-Rottluff began to create a new type of landscape with what many critics have discerned was ‘a Russian feel’. Reminiscent in some respects of the folk-art style of the early work of Russian avant-garde painters such as Kasimir Malevich and Natalia Goncharova, Schmidt-Rottluff’s new ‘numinous’ pictures were imbued with a universal sense of spiritual harmony reminiscent of the recent heightened-color abstract landscapes of Wassily Kandinsky and other artists of der Blaue Reiter. Marking a development from the emphasis on energy and vigor in his own earlier Expressionist landscapes that he had made as a member of die Brücke group in Dresden, Schmidt-Rottluff’s new post-war paintings were distinguished by a move toward the spiritual. As Will Grohmann has noted, this development was in many ways a reflection of his war experience. ‘What [Schmidt-Rottluff] painted in 1919 and 1920’, Grohmann writes ‘was born from the spirit of near-death and of renewed life’ (W. Grohmann, op. cit., p. 256). The reorientation of his work towards an expression of reality as a projection and manifestation of a universal spirit in his work at this time, may also reflect the influence upon him of Expressionist poets such as his great friend Else Lasker-Schüler and her circle in Berlin that included the great poetic champion of sky and landscape as a mystical domain of the spirit, Theodor Däubler.
During the last years of the war in 1918 Schmidt-Rottluff had poured his new spiritual feeling out in a now famous series of woodcuts, entitled Christus depicting reimagined scenes from the New Testament. These were works that have come to exemplify what, for a brief period was a powerful new wave of so-called ‘Cosmic’ Expressionism that accompanied the end of the war and the birth of the new German Republic. Schmidt-Rottluff’s ideals also subsequently translated into a new understanding of the external phenomena of the world as but a part of a unified underlying spiritual whole that quickly came to underpin all his paintings of this period. As Will Grohmann has written, "after 1918, his interest revolves around different values than in 1915, and the question of reality recedes behind the question of super-reality. What matters is the relationship of the depicted to the universal. Humans and nature exist within a system of relationships that relativizes the object, separates space from the measurable dimensions of surface and perspective, and conceives it as a projection of the infinite, but understands colors as 'great entities, as incarnate ideas, as essences of pure reason'" (W. Grohmann, op. cit., pp. 92-93).
Typifying this notion of a vibrant, ‘super-reality’, Harzlandschaft is one of Schmidt-Rottluff’s finest expressions of this new tendency and as such, also a work that later angered the Nazi authorities who, in addition to confiscating hundreds of Schmidt Rottluff’s works, selected this painting to exhibit at the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich in 1937.
—Robert Brown
Painted in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, circa 1918, Harzlandschaft (Harz Landscape) is a magnificent, vibrant landscape in which Schmidt-Rottluff depicts an idyllic scene in the Harz mountains of Northern Germany as a harmonious and holistic pictorial construction of color and form. The painting is one of a series of important works, made by Schmidt-Rottluff at this time that have come to be called ‘numinous paintings’ on account of their abstracted use of the intersecting of flat form and radiant color to convey an almost spiritual sense of a universal harmony and order at work in the world.
In 1918 Schmidt-Rottluff had returned to Germany after several years of military service in Lithuania, where he had both fought at the front and, at times, been able to further develop his art. There, as he frequently reported home, he had become enamored of the Russian landscape, even writing in one postcard, ‘If I linger in Russia much longer, all my patriotism and German pride are in danger of being destroyed - I like the Russian landscape with its great Slavic dreaminess too much.’ (Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, ‘Field postcard, July 4, 1915’ quoted in Schmidt Rottluff: Retrospektive, exh. cat., Bremen, 1989, p. 86)
On his return to Germany Schmidt-Rottluff began to create a new type of landscape with what many critics have discerned was ‘a Russian feel’. Reminiscent in some respects of the folk-art style of the early work of Russian avant-garde painters such as Kasimir Malevich and Natalia Goncharova, Schmidt-Rottluff’s new ‘numinous’ pictures were imbued with a universal sense of spiritual harmony reminiscent of the recent heightened-color abstract landscapes of Wassily Kandinsky and other artists of der Blaue Reiter. Marking a development from the emphasis on energy and vigor in his own earlier Expressionist landscapes that he had made as a member of die Brücke group in Dresden, Schmidt-Rottluff’s new post-war paintings were distinguished by a move toward the spiritual. As Will Grohmann has noted, this development was in many ways a reflection of his war experience. ‘What [Schmidt-Rottluff] painted in 1919 and 1920’, Grohmann writes ‘was born from the spirit of near-death and of renewed life’ (W. Grohmann, op. cit., p. 256). The reorientation of his work towards an expression of reality as a projection and manifestation of a universal spirit in his work at this time, may also reflect the influence upon him of Expressionist poets such as his great friend Else Lasker-Schüler and her circle in Berlin that included the great poetic champion of sky and landscape as a mystical domain of the spirit, Theodor Däubler.
During the last years of the war in 1918 Schmidt-Rottluff had poured his new spiritual feeling out in a now famous series of woodcuts, entitled Christus depicting reimagined scenes from the New Testament. These were works that have come to exemplify what, for a brief period was a powerful new wave of so-called ‘Cosmic’ Expressionism that accompanied the end of the war and the birth of the new German Republic. Schmidt-Rottluff’s ideals also subsequently translated into a new understanding of the external phenomena of the world as but a part of a unified underlying spiritual whole that quickly came to underpin all his paintings of this period. As Will Grohmann has written, "after 1918, his interest revolves around different values than in 1915, and the question of reality recedes behind the question of super-reality. What matters is the relationship of the depicted to the universal. Humans and nature exist within a system of relationships that relativizes the object, separates space from the measurable dimensions of surface and perspective, and conceives it as a projection of the infinite, but understands colors as 'great entities, as incarnate ideas, as essences of pure reason'" (W. Grohmann, op. cit., pp. 92-93).
Typifying this notion of a vibrant, ‘super-reality’, Harzlandschaft is one of Schmidt-Rottluff’s finest expressions of this new tendency and as such, also a work that later angered the Nazi authorities who, in addition to confiscating hundreds of Schmidt Rottluff’s works, selected this painting to exhibit at the infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition in Munich in 1937.
—Robert Brown