Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (1884 Rottluff bei Chemnitz - 1976 Berlin). Schwertlilien. 1958 Watercolour and India ink drawing. Signed lower centre. On laid paper. 69,5 x 50 cm (27,3 x 19,6 in), the full sheet. With work number '586 d.i. 6. Aquarell 1958' in lower centre, presumably by the artist. Inscribed with the number '48/68' on verso by a hand other than that of the artist Provenienz: Private collection South Germany. Born in Rottluff near Chemnitz in 1884, Karl Schmidt was a miller's son. He began to study architecture at Dresden Technical University in 1905 but would become famous as a painter, printmaker and sculptor. That same year he joined forces with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Fritz Bleyl to form the artists' collective known as 'Brücke". In 1906 they published their first collective portfolio of prints. In his Expressionist paintings, Karl-Schmidt-Rottluff gave his passionately applied, picture-determining colours an intense glow. He went farthest among his contemporaries in the use of unmixed primary colours. Until 1912 Schmidt-Rottluff often went to Dangast and Dangast Fen at Varel near Oldenburg, where he spent quite a lot of time collecting numerous motifs for his landscapes. On moving to Berlin in 1911, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff turned to problems of form, developing an increasingly reductive geometric formal language but this development was interrupted by the outbreak of war. While on active duty, he produced a cycle of woodcuts with religious subject matter, in which he tried to come to terms with the horrors of war. They are considered his finest prints. In 1918 he returned to Berlin. During the 1920s he retained the same work rhythm, spending his summers on painting excursions and working in his studio in winter. Stays on Lake Lebsko (then Leba) in Pomerania, in the Ticino and the Taunus as well as in Rome as a guest student at the German Academy in the Villa Massimo (1930) inspired Schmidt-Rottluff's nature still lifes and landscapes. In 1937 his work was defamed at the notorious Munich exhibition of 'degenerate art". By 1941 he was forbidden to paint and was dismissed from the professional union. After the second world war, Schmidt-Rottluff held a chair at the (West) Berlin Hochschule für bildende Künste. His late work links up with the motifs of his Expressionist phase yet is more subtle and less intensive in palette. In his youth celebrated as an innovator and an incendiary, Schmidt-Rottluff was decorated with the Pour le Mérite in 1956 and honoured as a classic. The Brücke Museum founded in Berlin at his instigation opened in 1967. Schmidt-Rottluff's watercolours are determined by the drawing; the composition is thus established and its painterly effect consolidated. The subject matter is almost always viewed in close-up and the colour surfaces with which Schmidt-Rottluff has underpinned the action are pure and juxtaposed. A lucid clarity of coloration distinguishes his watercolours, which represent a consciously autonomous component of the artist's aeuvre. Numerous exhibitions in the Federal Republic of Germany have paid tribute to Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, who is unanimously recognised by art historians as one of the most greatest exponents of German Expressionism. [KD]. In very good condition.