(Rottluff/Chemnitz 1884–1976 Berlin)
Metallica, 1963, signed SRotluff, numbered 637, watercolor, gouache on strong paper, 70 x 50 cm, framed

The work is registered with the work-number in the archive of the Karl and Emy Schmidt-Rottluff Foundation.

Provenance:
Frankfurter Kunstkabinett, Hanna Bekker vom Rath, Frankfurt am Main
Private Collection, Germany - acquired from the above in 1967

In 1905, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff founded the artists' association "Brücke" alongside Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Fritz Bleyl, whose style was to become influential for German Expressionism.

Over his creative period, Schmidt-Rottluff developed an increasingly reduced and geometric formal language. The artist achieved a high degree of formal and colour abstraction, but did not lose touch with reality. Between the two world wars, Hanna Bekker vom Rath emerged as a patron and the most important supporter of his art. She was a painter herself and collector. These circumstances would lead her to open her own gallery. When Schmidt-Rottluff was ostracised by the Nazis and no longer allowed to paint, she offered him a refuge as well as a studio in her Blue House in Hofheim am Taunus. In her Berlin flat on the Regensburger Straße she organised secret exhibitions of forbidden expressionist art, which was then outlawed as degenerate, and was instrumental in bringing paintings to safety. In 1947 Hanna Bekker vom Rath opened the Frankfurt Kunstkabinett, from whence the two works offered here originate. Both watercolours belong to Schmidt-Rottluff's late work. They show that the artist remained faithful to representationalism and his personal style into old age, even in the midst of the incipient abstract tendencies of the post-war years.