Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Die Brucke founder whose woodcuts hit harder than anyone else's in the group.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was born in Rottluff near Chemnitz in 1884 and added his birthplace to his name; he was one of the four founders of Die Brucke in Dresden in 1905 and gave the group its title. His painting uses heavy, unmixed slabs of colour with no transition, and his woodcuts — particularly the religious series of 1918, made after four years on the Eastern Front — are the most brutal and the most concentrated the movement produced. The Nazis declared him degenerate, confiscated over six hundred works and forbade him to paint in 1941. He returned to teach in Berlin after the war and died in 1976.
The Brucke-period paintings are scarce, partly because of the confiscations, and provenance between 1933 and 1945 is unavoidable — restitution research is standard practice here. The woodcuts and lithographs, catalogued by Schapire and by Rathenau, are the bulk of what trades, and impression quality, paper, hand-colouring and whether a sheet is a period impression rather than a later printing are what set the value. Watercolours from the post-war decades are numerous. The market is principally German, and the Brucke Museum in Berlin holds the reference material.
If you own a work by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.