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Art of the 20th Century
Karl
Schmidt-Rottluff
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
(b Rottluff, nr Chemnitz, 1 Dec 1884; d West Berlin, 10 Aug 1976).
German painter and printmaker. One of the main exponents of EXPRESSIONISM, he was a founder of DIE BRÜCKE and one of its leading members. As a boy he got to know Erich Heckel at grammar school, following in his footsteps in 1905 when he enrolled as an architectural student at the Sächsische Technische Hochschule in Dresden; there Heckel introduced him to another student, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, four years his senior, and to Kirchner’s friend, the painter Fritz Bleyl (1880–1966). They all felt close in their artistic aspirations, perceiving their architectural studies as a front behind which they could train, largely by teaching themselves, as painters. Later that year, by which time Schmidt-Rottluff had annexed the name of his native town to his surname, they formed Die Brücke with the aim of creating an uncompromisingly vital art that renounced all traditions; the group’s name, derived from a quotation in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (1883) was suggested by Schmidt-Rottluff, although as something of a loner he was less active in the group than Heckel or Kirchner. It was, however, at his invitation that Emil Nolde briefly became an active member of the group in 1906. Schmidt-Rottluff also introduced the group to lithography.
