From the 1930s until the end of the Second World War, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff faced considerable uncertainties. From 1933, his art was defamed as "degenerate" by the National Socialists,\~his works were removed\~from German museums, and some\~of them\~were subject to public scorn in the "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich in 1937. In April 1941, he was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts and banned from painting. Nevertheless, Schmidt-Rottluff continued to work: Henceforth, he was forced to devote himself to watercolors, in particular, as well as to color chalk drawings such as the work "Verschneite Schonung" from the early 1940s (June 8, Modern Art Day Sale, lot 477, Hermann Gerlinger Collection). Schmidt-Rottluff also succeeded in demonstrating his\~great\~artistic skill in these techniques. In the fall of 1943, an air raid destroyed his studio and apartment in Berlin. Schmidt-Rottluff and his wife Emy returned from Rumbke to the artist's childhood home in Chemnitz-Rottluff, where they lived until the end of 1946.\~This\~is where he created this color chalk drawing with the emotionally charged landscape motif of his home in Rottluff. Schmidt-Rottluff used the motif of the dark trees towering against the colorful evening sky to revisit a motif from the heyday of his expressive landscape painting and his graphic art, which he combined with a\~special, delicate colorfulness,\~strong\~contours and an emphasis on striking compositions of forms to create a fascinating landscape of a suspenseful ambiance.
The post-war period also had great challenges in store for the artist. In a letter to the artist Curt Stoermer in 1945, he wrote: "All that remained was an unimaginable chaos, which takes all our strength to sort out. We were among the survivors, but there is not much else left." (quoted\~from:\~Gunther Thiem (ed.), Schmidt-Rottluff. Retrospektive, Munich 1989, p. 100). The situation improved when the artist accepted a post as a professor at the 'Hochschule für Bildende Künste' in Charlottenburg, which enabled him to return to Berlin in 1946. He made new works in which he drew on his Expressionist phase. Schmidt-Rottluff was skeptical of the abstract tendencies prevalent in post-war Germany; he remained committed to figurative, narrative painting and found inspiration in nature and his everyday surroundings. In the post-war years, he was finally able to indulge in lush, colorful oil painting again and discovered - possibly in memory and during the ongoing mental and emotional processing of the war years - the artistic potential for a realization in oil in his strikingly colored chalk drawing from the 1940s: About 20 years after he had made the drawing, he created "Verschneite Schonung" in oil on canvas in 1964. This is one of the very few paintings in which Schmidt-Rottluff transferred a color chalk drawing from the 1940s into an impressive depiction in oil.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff enjoyed a long, active artistic life and works from his late creative period are also characterized by a remarkable presence. "Time and again the world must be seen anew, reinterpreted and everyone must contribute their share - so there is no reason to give up", declared the artist in 1951 (quoted from: C. Remm, "Immer wieder muss die Welt neu gesehen werden", in: Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Die Berliner Jahre 1946-1976, ed. by M. M. Moeller, Brücke-Museum Berlin, Munich 2005, p. 32). Building on his expressionist color palette of the pre-war years and the "Brücke" period, Schmidt-Rottluff once again brings color to life in his late work (cf. Magdalena M. Moeller). The later color worlds testify to the power of bold decisions and youthful energy. In their purity, intensity and luminous radiance, the colors are in the foreground and determine both composition and pictorial effect, which is also revealed in the work offered here. Only the snow-covered slope counterbalances the strong coloring of the rest of the depiction. In addition to the color, it is the two-dimensional painting style and the form that evoke an extraordinary modernity through their clarity, a stronger degree of abstraction and the combination of individual concise shapes with large, open surfaces. Here Schmidt-Rottluff demonstrates his mature skill with cool, powerful and high-contrast coloring, exciting cold-warm contrasts, strong contours and the juxtaposition of soft, curved and angular, reduced-abstract forms, creating a work of mystical and enigmatic expressiveness. In the same year, Schmidt-Rottluff stopped painting in oil paint, making this one of the great expressionist's last paintings. [CH]