In the immediate postwar years, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was faced with major difficulties. In the fall of 1943, his studio and apartment in Berlin were destroyed in an air raid. In a letter to the artist Curt Stoermer from 1945, he noted: “It was a tremendous disaster, and cleaning up the mess took every scrap of energy I had left. We were among the survivors, but little else remained. (Quoted from: Gunther Thiem (ed.), Schmidt-Rottluff. Retrospektive, Munich 1989, p. 100). Together with his wife Emy, the artist spent several years in his hometown of Rottluff. It was not until the fall of 1946 that he returned to Berlin, where he took up a professorship at the newly founded Academy of Fine Arts. After the one-year blockade of West Berlin by the Soviet Union—a situation he depicted in some of his works—he returned to his former pace of life in the 1950s. Schmidt-Rottluff began spending the summer months on the Baltic Sea again, with a preference for the Bay of Lübeck, marking the beginning of his impressive series of late landscape paintings. Like “Julimond,” they demonstrate "the possibilities of the absolute fusion of line and form into virtually abstract organic structures. [...] This is not merely about the depiction of landscape, but about the organization of the composition from lines, forms, and color spaces.” (Christiane Remm, in: Exhibition catalog Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Die Berliner Jahre 1946–1976, Brücke Museum, Berlin 2005/2006, p. 27)




Building on the themes of his expressionist work from the years before the war and his time with the “Brücke” group, Schmidt-Rottluff lets his palette come to life. “The world must be seen anew, reinterpreted over and over again, with everyone contributing their share – so there is no reason to give up,” the artist explained in 1951 (quoted from: ibid., p. 32). In their purity, intensity, and radiance, these late, bold worlds of color take center stage and define the painting's overall visual impact. Trees and bushes appear as black silhouettes against the light, forming a dark counterpoint to the bold coloration of the rest of the composition. In addition to the color, it is the flat painting style and the curved forms that evoke an extraordinary modernity through their clarity, a higher degree of abstraction, and the combination of individual, striking shapes with large, open areas. With a predominantly cool, powerful color palette and dynamic warm-cold and light-dark contrasts, strong contours, and the juxtaposition of soft, curved, and angular, pointed forms, Schmidt-Rottluff created a landscape imbued with a mystical, enigmatic expressiveness, through which the great Expressionist was able to assert his position within German post-war art. [CH]