25 - Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Stilleben mit Flasche und blauem Glas 1909 Watercolour on wove paper, mounted on Japan paper. 38.2 x 54.8 cm. Signed and dated 'S-Rottluff 1909' in black lower left, titled 'Stilleben mit Flasche und blauem Glas' on Japan paper verso. - Colour-fresh condition. We would like to thank Christiane Remm, Brücke Museum Berlin, for kind information. Provenance Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft; on loan to the Sprengel Museum Hanover (since 1979, acquired from the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum Hannover), inv. no. DL 2653 Exhibitions Cologne 1961 (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum), Ars viva '61, cat. no. 140 with illus. p. 38; Hannover/Essen/Frankfurt/Berlin 1964 (Kunstverein/Museum Folkwang/Kunstverein/Akademie der Künste), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Graphik, cat. no. 12; Hanover 1982 (Sprengel Museum), Die Künstlergemeinschaft "Brücke". Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen und Druckgraphik, cat. no. 170; Bremen/Munich 1989 (Kunsthalle/Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus), Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Retrospektive, cat. no. 44, col. plate 18 Literature Gunther Thiem. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Aquarelle und Zeichnungen. Munich 1963, p. 30 with illus.; Die Künstlergruppe "Brücke". Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max Pechstein, Otto Mueller. Gemälde, Aquarelle, Zeichnungen und Druckgraphik. Verzeichnis der Bestände, Kunstmuseum Hannover mit Sammlung Sprengel, Hannover 1982, p. 185, illus. 170 The Art Collection of the Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft The Kulturkreis der deutschen Wirtschaft has the richest tradition of any institution for corporate cultural patronage in Germany. Since 1951 this nationwide, independent network has been bringing together companies, trade associations, individual entrepreneurs and company-affiliated foundations that are committed to supporting culture. During the post-war period, the primary focus was on assembling a representative collection in addition to providing material support to artists. This has led to a significant collection comprising works ranging from classic modern art to post-war abstraction to contemporary art. In order to support the artists as well as public art collections, these works have been provided as long-term loans to famous museums, such as the Nationalgalerie Berlin, Kunstmuseum Bonn, Kunsthalle Mannheim and Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum in Aachen. The Kulturkreis has now commissioned the Kunsthaus Lempertz to auction important works from the early years of this collection. On the History of the Collection When the Kulturkreis was founded in 1951, its members joined together with the goal of securing and supporting the free development of art and culture in Germany, deliberately distancing themselves from the rigid cultural politics of the Nazi dictatorship’s ideologisation and denunciation of so-called “degenerate art”. “The cultural ‘razing’ resulting from Nazi cultural politics,” writes Beate Reese, “the expulsion and murder of the leading avant-garde artists, […] had left behind a vacuum after the end of the Second World War. The long years spent hiding in secrecy and the deep rupture after the end of the Nazi regime made it more difficult to connect with what had been abruptly interrupted in 1933 or, at the latest, through the “Degenerate Art” exhibition in 1937” (cited from: Befreite Moderne. Kunst in Deutschland 1945 bis 1949, exh. cat. Mühlheim an der Ruhr 2015, p. 9). Within the context of this cultural turning point, the Kulturkreis first established contact with artists who had already driven the development of modern art before the Nazi regime, including Willi Baumeister, Karl Hofer, Emy Roeder, Max Kaus, Gerhard Marcks and Ernst Wilhelm Nay but also “Brücke” artists Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and, not least, the late impressionist Hans Purrmann. Many artists experienced a resurging artistic energy again directly after the end of the war, working with impressive productivity and appreciating the recognition of the Kulturkreis. In the early 1950s, the foundation also occupied itself with the so-called “second generation” of modern artists and bought works by Werner Gilles, Georg Meistermann, Joseph Fassbender, Hann Trier, Werner Heldt, Otto Ritschl, Alfred Lörcher, Peter Brüning and Horst Antes. The central instrument for this patronage was to purchase the artists’ works, make them better known and loan them to museums all across Germany – and this was also used as a way to make up for the extensive confiscation of modern artworks by the Nazis. Support in the Field of Cultural Politics through the Foundation of “ars viva” The Kulturkreis’s support in the field of cultural politics also includes the “ars viva” prize: introduced in 1953, it is awarded to a contemporary artist whose works the members of the jury consider potentially groundbreaking. The award is linked with prize money and a series of exhibitions. In the years since its creation, the prize has honoured the outstanding positions of over 350 artists, including Peter Brüning, Gerhard Wind, Horst Janssen, Horst Antes, Günter Fruhtrunk, Georg Baselitz and Rosemarie Trockel. The much-admired exhibition “ars viva ’61” was held at Cologne’s Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in 1961 to mark the tenth anniversary of the Kulturkreis’s founding. Designed by Joseph Fassbender, its catalogue provides a good overview of the works considered modern at that time, including those of Eduard Bargheer, Hermann Blumenthal, Emil Cimiotti, Werner Gilles, HAP Grieshaber, Peter Herkenrath, Fritz Koenig, Kurt Lehmann, Alfred Lörcher, Hans Meyboden, Theodor Werner and Mac Zimmermann. A few of these artists are less well known today but were considered promising and worthy of focused support in the 1950s. Many of the paintings, graphic works and sculptures exhibited in 1961 will be placed up for auction at the Kunsthaus Lempertz in early December 2026 in order to – as the Kulturkreis has emphasised – increase the amount of funding available for the support of current, contemporary art. As Dr Paul-Bernhard Kallen, chairman of the board of the Kulturkreis, has recently underscored: the need to provide committed support for art is just as important today as it was when the foundation was founded in 1951. The institution is thus affirming its policy of not just preserving art but also supporting new, current positions. "Stillleben mit Flasche und blauem Glas" is an extraordinarily fresh and highly luminous watercolour. From the founding of their association through Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and others, the Brücke artists intensively studied international artists like Denis, van Dongen, Friesz, van Gogh, Munch and Vlaminck in Dresden. Magdalena M. Moeller explains in regards to Schmidt-Rottluff, that – after he had seen a comprehensive exhibition with works by Vincent van Gogh – “the atmospheric depiction of nature [...] had given way to an expressive, impassioned visual language characterized by impasto” (Moeller, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Zu Leben und Werk, in: Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, ex. cat., Munich 1997, p. 15). In a letter to Gustav Schiefler dated to 1909, Schmidt-Rottluff accordingly writes: “Painting can only actually mean: practicing renunciation before nature, and perhaps doing this in the right place is a definition of art.” (cit. from: Moeller, Protagonist der Moderne. Das malerische Schaffen 1904 bis 1928, in: ex. cat. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Der Maler, Stuttgart 1992, p. 12f.). Our “Stilleben mit Flasche und blauem Glas” is particularly open to comparison with works by the French Fauves and their use of colours directly from the tube or from the paint box. Watercolours – of which he produced around 20 in 1909 – allowed Schmidt-Rottluff to experiment with his compositions. Our still life, for example, is very deliberately defined by numerous diagonals and the shapes in nearly unmixed colours that are formed by them: this provides an almost white, flat space for the blue glass and the bottle in the middle, and these two objects – carried out in bold shades of blue, red and green – stand out luminously against it. The regulated flow of the paint leads to the fact that, “on the one hand, the depicted forms maintain a greater consistency and take on a more defined appearance than in the landscape motifs but, on the other hand, they begin to drift and gain stability only within an abstract pictorial order” (Armin Zweite, "Das Erleben transzendentaler Dinge im Irdischen", in: Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Retrospektive, ex. cat., Munich 1989, p. 34). Moeller additionally describes how “all the parts of the image, the near and far, the foreground and background […] [are] pulled together into a single plane” (Moeller, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Zu Leben und Werk, p. 19). And she emphasizes: “The watercolours created in 1909 are among Schmidt-Rottluff’s most magnificent achievements” (ibid.).