Artistic and personal awakening after the First World War

The years following the First World War proved to be a particularly fruitful, eventful and successful time for Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. In 1919, Galerie Ferdinand Möller in Berlin held the first major solo exhibition after the war, and in the period that followed, the number of exhibitions and participations in exhibitions increased sharply. An enthusiastic essay by Ernst Gosebruch, then director of the Essen Art Museum, appears in the art magazine Genius. In 1920, the first monograph on Karl Schmidt-Rottluff is published by Wilhelm R. Valentiner. Numerous museums acquired the artist's works, which, after the privations of the war years, now express not only his enormous artistic creativity but also a mature and particularly powerful expressiveness. Schmidt-Rottluff is now one of the most important artists living in Germany.

During the war years, artistic work was only possible to a very limited extent. Schmidt-Rottluff was drafted into military service as early as May 1915 and was stationed in Russia and Lithuania until 1918. Initially, he was deployed as a soldier in the construction of posts, trenches and barbed wire fortifications. In late 1916, he was transferred to the auditing office of the press department through the intervention of the writer Richard Dehmel. The artist was unable to devote himself to painting during these years, but he did create some woodcuts and wood sculptures, many of which were unfortunately destroyed during the Second World War.

In the spring after his return, Schmidt-Rottluff marries the photographer Emy Frisch, who also comes from Chemnitz and whom he had already met several years earlier. He establishes new contacts with the sculptors Georg Kolbe, Richard Scheibe and Emy Roeder, as well as with the architect Walter Gropius. The artist laboriously tried to detach himself from what he had experienced: “I am very little satisfied with this summer, which, with its oppressive melancholy, found that all too receptive soil. The whole agony of the war years had such an effect that I still could not free myself from it and felt very weak in the process. I have regained some confidence in color – but that may be all,” Schmidt-Rottluff wrote to his friend and collector, the art historian Wilhelm Niemeyer, in 1919. (Quoted from: Gerhard Wietek, Schmidt-Rottluff in Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein, Neumünster 1984, p. 62)

The Baltic Sea paradise of Jershöft: a retreat and source of inspiration

In his efforts to come to terms with his wartime experiences, the artist longed for peace and quiet, seclusion and intense encounters with nature. In 1920, he discovered the fishing village of Jershöft [today: Jarosławiec] on the Baltic Sea in what was then called Eastern Pomerania, just a few hours by train from Berlin. Jershöft remained the summer residence of the artist and his family until 1931. They regularly spent the summer months between May and September in the secluded village on the coast, which now proved not only to be a haven of peace and a place of longing, but also a source of great inspiration.
Here the artist came to appreciate the landscape and the simple life far from the big city, observed the people of Jershöft going about their daily, usually physically demanding work in an unusual rural setting, and finally processed this wealth of impressions and experiences into expressive pictorial ideas, entirely without socio-critical undertones. During these creative years, the depictions of workers, fishermen, farmers and craftsmen, along with the landscapes, are among the most important pictorial themes of his oeuvre from the 1920s.

The experiences Schmidt-Rottluff gained with his expressive woodcuts, which he created towards the end of the war, can now also be found in his painting: Simplified, almost geometrically abstracted forms and generous areas determine the character of the composition, while strong contrasts of light and dark and cold and warm subtly recall the black and white of the woodcuts, but are given a further dimension by the radiance of the colors.

Expressive density in a frenzy of colors

The work offered here, Barn, also stems from this important period of creation. It was painted during Schmidt-Rottluff's second stay in Jershöft in 1921 and attests to his enormous artistic development as well as to the pent-up creative urge that had built up during the war years and which now broke through with great energy in a highly expressive, powerfully coloured and dynamic-expressive composition.

The figures, which are not formulated as individuals but rather schematized and greatly simplified, are arranged in a circle, showing a communal togetherness necessary for this life, and are shown frontally except for the female figure on the right, who is kept in cool blue. The painter and the viewer are located in the interior of the barn, in the far corner of the building, separated from the working figures at the entrance by a barrier, a large pile of hay. Although Schmidt-Rottluff places himself in the midst of the action on the side of the workers, he remains an objective observer despite his fascination and interest.

As with the artist's other images of workers, the activity depicted in the picture is not the actual subject of the portrayal, despite the clear motif. Instead, it is formal aspects that Schmidt-Rottluff impressively explores here and elevates to the central content of the image.
The once so distinct dark contours are now broken up, sometimes left out completely or reduced to shorter contouring lines, allowing the sculptural figures to merge with their surroundings in places. The calm, atmospheric and harmonious compositions of the pre-war years, with their expressive flat style, gave way to a “zone painting” that was also based on the colored surface and which now contained a wealth of emotions and dynamics. (Will Grohmann, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Stuttgart 1956, p. 106)
Color now takes center stage: it develops a magnificent, radiant life of its own. Schmidt-Rottluff boldly juxtaposes radiant, deep blue with contrasting, rich sun yellow and warming reddish brown with bright, almost gaudy orange red. The representational is thus dissolved into color with broad, visible brushstrokes in places; forms intertwine and mutate into a colorful, planar painting with angular outlines and an enormous expressive density. [CH]

Provenance

The rural motif of the barn should not be misleading: it is rare to encounter artworks with such a complex, international history.

It is highly likely that the painting was among the works that the artist loaned to the Anderson Galleries in New York in 1923 for an exhibition of German art. Wilhelm R. Valentiner rejoices in the catalog's preface: “Schmidt-Rottluff appears as the most individual and powerful personality in Germany. In the surety of his artistic advance, he is reminiscent of Van Gogh, without being influenced by him; but he goes much further than Van Gogh. [...] He aspires to the greatest possible simplification of form and expresses his emotions in a condensed way, with powerful lines and vast surfaces of color. He knows how to render the subconscious life of nature and humanity with uncanny power.“ (”Schmidt-Rottluff appears to be the most individual and strongest personality in Germany. In the certainty of his artistic stance, he recalls Van Gogh without being influenced by him; but he goes much further than Van Gogh. [...] He strives for the greatest simplification of form and expresses his emotions in a condensed way, with powerful lines and large areas of color. He understands how to depict the subconscious life of nature and humanity with almost uncanny power.")
Probably shortly thereafter, but certainly before 1928, the art dealer Ferdinand Möller purchased the painting. Möller, a bookseller by trade, began his fabulously successful career in 1912 at the famous Galerie Arnold in Dresden; in 1910, the gallery's owner at the time, Ludwig Gutbier, had presented the epochal exhibition of the “Brücke” artists. In 1913, Möller founded a branch of the Arnold Gallery in Breslau, and then in October 1918, he set up his own gallery on Potsdamer Strasse in Berlin. His artists included Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and others. Like many other paintings by the “Brücke” group, the work “Barn” remained in the gallery's possession. And Möller sent it to other important exhibitions: in his review of the show “50 ausgewählte Werke heutiger Kunst” (50 selected works of contemporary art) in the magazine “Kunstblatt”, Paul Westheim called the painting “a concept of extraordinary intensity”. It then went on a tour that took it from Berlin to Königsberg and Danzig. Back in Berlin in 1931, the painting was shown in the programmatic exhibition “Women in Need” – as the embodiment of the exploited female farmhand.

However, the tide was soon to turn for modern art. In July 1937, the infamous exhibition “Degenerate Art” opened; the artworks confiscated from museums were finally expropriated by law by Hitler on May 1, 1938. In response, Möller had 19 works, including our painting, shipped to his friend Wilhelm R. Valentiner in Detroit on loan. The German-American art historian had been director of the Detroit Art Institute since 1924 and published the first monograph on Karl Schmidt-Rottluff as early as 1920. On October 30, 1950, the Möller collection was confiscated as “enemy property” by the “Vesting Order” of the Department of Justice, Office of Alien Property, and taken over by the US government. After long and arduous negotiations – Ferdinand Möller had died in January 1956 – 17 of the paintings originally sent as loans finally arrived in Cologne, where the gallery had been based since 1951, in January 1958. The family donates two paintings, Wassily Kandinsky's “Bild mit weißer Form” from 1913 and Lyonel Feininger's “Grüne Brücke” from 1916, to the Detroit Art Institute and the North Carolina Museum of Arts in Raleigh as compensation.

In 1961, Maria Möller-Garny donated “Scheune” to the Stuttgarter Kunstkabinett. The painting then found its way into the important Berthold and Else Beitz Collection in Essen, having been brokered by Wilhelm Grosshennig. [MvL/AT]