New artistic drive
Schmidt-Rottluff spent the summer months between June and September of 1919 with the photographer Emy Frisch, who had been his wife since March 21, in the village of Hohwacht on the Baltic Sea, where the artist painted a series of important pictures, among them a self-portrait with hat or the portrait of Emy as counterpart. Other pictures that use this sandy soil as a stage for the scenes include "Juniabend” (June Evening, fig.), "Frauen am Meer” (Women by the Sea, fig.) or "Frauen im Grünen” (Women in the Green, fig.), in which he put his wife Emy along with another person, fo instance the art historian and patron Rosa Schapire, at the center. But he also romantic moonlight and coastal landscapes with striding and meditating women; or as is the case here, a completely pure landscape with only the balanced and closed forms of nature, the vast dunes and the sky that leave room to breathe and space to linger in thought. "I am not very satisfied with this summer, which provided a basis that was all too prone to severe melancholy. All the torment of the war years had such an effect that I have not yet been able to free myself from it and I found myself too weak to work. I have regained some confidence in color - that may be all", wrote Schmidt-Rottluff from Hohwacht to his friend and collector, the art historian Wilhelm Niemeyer, on August 28, 1919 . (Quoted from: Gerhard Wietek, Schmidt-Rottluff in Hamburg und Schleswig-Holstein, Neumünster 1984, p. 62.)

The object as the pictorial form
This confession reinforces the melancholic impression of the nature surrounding him on a bright summer day, that the artist expresses in a harmonious color palette. Complementary contrasts in soft gradations fill the surfaces of this narrow landscape section near the Baltic Sea. The harmony between the lines and curves, the surfaces and bodies of the plants is unprecedented in his oeuvre. The elements of the landscape become pure symbols: the elongate lines of the barren branches with the striking foliage, the bordering curves of the large-leaved blue plant along with other shrubs on the edge of a green strip with a striking interior zigzag pattern, which in turn, is bordered by a rustic natural stone wall. Schmidt-Rottluff succeeded in interlocking message and means, which he expands from his repertoire of artistic means, with the surfaces in complementary colors. The experience gained in expressive woodcuts created towards the end of the war is helpful here: hard-edged surfaces and their complementary contrasts in black and white, which Schmidt-Rottluff transfers into an expressive surface style. This makes for an impression of spatial depth, layered landscapes reminiscent of Paul Cézanne. And yet, infinity in the picture has become finite, the sky in yellowish ocher above the stone wall is a 'wall', and its color does not mean distance, it means the sun’s reflecting light. The earthly brown is occasionally projected onto the light space and the ethereal blue on the ground is pink. Will Grohmann, art historian and author of Schmidt-Rottluff’s first catalogue raisonné, sees what the French "Fauves" propagated with their paintings of color surfaces and zones: "Given that the painter integrates it properly into his artistic concept of the world, space can also be settled on the surface, color can be just symbolic, and body can be plastic. With the design, however, the number of means increases as does the certainty of their interlocking." (Will Grohmann, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Stuttgart 1956, p. 24) The black contours help the neighboring colors to create a connection; However, it has nothing to do with the object or its projection, but is a painterly form that mediates between object and space, eliminates material isolation, incorporates it into the surface and creates a tiered pictorial space. Ultimately, however, the entire course of the day with morning and evening is decided in this pure landscape; an experience that the landscape and sea of the north teach, even this wonderful day is never just day. [MvL]

Dr. William Landmann – The Eventful Story Behind An Acclaimed Collection
Only a few of the large Jewish art collections were able to survive the National Socialist dictatorship as a whole. In this regard, the story of the works of art owned by Dr. Wilhelm Landmann from Mannheim is ever the more remarkable. Wilhelm Landmann was born in Schifferstadt in 1891. Among his eleven siblings, he was always considered the ‘intellectual’ and aptly earned a PhD title in both economics and law. He spent his study days with a no less important friend: Herbert Tannenbaum (1892–1958). Their biographies would remain closely intertwined throughout their lives.

1920 was a key year for Tannenbaum and Landmann. Herbert Tannenbaum opened his avant-garde art gallery “Das Kunsthaus” in Mannheim, which would be the source of most works in the collection of his best friend Wilhelm over the following decade. Likewise in 1920, Wilhelm, for his part, became a partner in his brother Paul's company, the renowned “Graphische Druckanstalt Paul Isidor Landmann” in Mannheim. That same summer he married Julie Herbst, daughter of a well-known corset manufacturer from Mannheim, whom he had met during his studies.

When the National Socialists came into power, the Landmanns - both Wilhelm and his wife Julie were Jewish – faced increasing pressure and it soon showed that they had to leave their home country. Julie's sister had already been living in the Netherlands for some years with her husband Otto Wachenheim, who was also a well-known art collector, so they had quickly found their emigration destination. In the spring of 1936, Wilhelm, Julie and their two sons fled to Amsterdam. The Tannenbaums followed their friends at the end of the year. A small emigrant community of art lovers formed in Amsterdam, and they were in active contact with the painters Max Beckmann and Heinrich Campendonk. When Campendonk visited the Landmanns in their apartment in 1938, he saw a small drawing by Franz Marc and he told them that he was with Marc when he made the sheet.

The Landmanns were also in close contact with Willem Sandberg (1897–1984), curator and from 1938 deputy director at the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, as well as a strong advocate of Modernism. Today he is remembered as the “savior” of the Landmann Collection. In July 1939, shortly before the war began, Landmann donated parts of his collection to the museum and moved to Toronto with his family, knowing what was to come.

The donation list reads like a Who’s Who of the luminaries of German Modernism - Nolde, Dix, Lehmbruck, Grosz, Kokoschka and others. The paintings by Pechstein, Mueller, Schmidt-Rottluff and Hofer offered here were also on that list. From then on, parts of the Landmann Collection were on display at the Stedelijk Museum, while the rest was kept in safe custody. The Landmann family's handwritten inventory states that the paintings offered here were exhibited in Amsterdam.

The Landmann Collection could survive the war years at the Stedelijk Museum. In 1946, Wilhelm Landmann, who henceforth called himself William, received his paintings and sculptures back. He subsequently parted with some works - in 1946, for example, he sold the painting “Metropolis” (Big City) by George Grosz to the then highly renowned Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it is still located today. But he kept other works in his collection, which was exhibited on several occasions at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto over the following years. [AT]