North Carolina Museum of Art

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HIGHLIGHTS

20th-Century Collection

1910–1950

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
(German, 1884–1976)

Portrait of Emy, 1919
Oil on canvas, 28 5/16 x 25 3/4 in. (73.5 x 65.5 cm)
Bequest of W. R. Valentiner, 65.10.58
© 2004 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

The member who thought up Die Brücke's name, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff exercised a raw talent that made his style the most vigorous of the group. Exploiting an innate understanding of composition, he carved out a crudely monumental style characterized by drastically reduced forms rendered in hotly contrasting colors. His formal vocabulary reflects the impact of cubist works, which had been exhibited in Germany since 1912. Schmidt-Rottluff was the Die Brücke artist most affected by the Parisian school.

If cubism played its part in Schmidt-Rottluff's development, so did his interest in African art and his experiments with woodcut printing. These influences are interwoven in Portrait of Emy, with its face like a mask sculpted from a block of wood. Schmidt-Rottluff contorts physical facts in order to emphasize emotion. Painted the year he married Emy Frisch, the portrait of his bride manifests the aggressively antinaturalist colors, the emphatic Rottluff outlines and the heightened distortion of appearance that typify German expressionism. The artist allows the rough texture of the canvas to show through, further denying the illusion of reality. In succeeding decades, though he gradually softened this harsh, almost barbaric simplification of form, Schmidt-Rottluff continued extracting from his subject a potent expressivity.