Jershöft, a place of inspiration
Arriving from Berlin in the summer of 1920, Schmidt-Rottluff visited the quaint fishing village of Jershöft in Pomerania on the Baltic Sea for the first time. The village's striking landmark is a lighthouse built in 1865. The brick tower impresses with its 35-meter height.
The fishing village, which he would visit over the summers of the coming years until 1931, was a peaceful oasis in the turbulent post-war years for the artist, especially in the light of political struggles between extremist groups in the fledgling Weimar Republic, especially in his home city of Berlin. Schmidt-Rottluff devoted much of his work to rural life. His subjects were fishermen, farmers, artisans, and laborers, who, through their daily work, were at one with the landscape, inspiring the artist to create these energetic works.




Depictions of rural life
Special mention should be made of the painting "Fischer auf der Düne" (Fishermen on the Dune), a key work in the pictures showing workers and craftsmen. Schmidt-Rottluff's efforts to attain monumentality with a highly dynamic painting style become tangible. Generous, simplified forms and large color zones determine the character of the composition, a multifaceted landscape with cliffs and dunes. Schmidt-Rottluff captured the outlines of figures and objects, such as the boat, with rapid, almost sketchy brushstrokes. The contours are almost always rendered in black. The color takes on a vibrant, luminous life within the surface-determining boundaries. It is always this sublime use of color, the substantial, deep blue so typical of Schmidt-Rottluff, in contrast to olive ocher and reddish brown, that is now used preferentially and blended into a harmonious whole. The fishermen and the boat occasionally take on sculptural forms, and the artist uses rhythmic shapes and color fields that extend beyond their contours to assimilate the figures of the fishermen into the landscape. The textural treatment of color, the rich application of paint, and the solid forms bounded by contours make the work so compelling. Here, figures and objects have a somewhat arbitrary appearance, morphing into a colored surface painting that brings new momentum to his art and allows it to intensify its expressiveness.




Radiant colors and vibrant surfaces
In the Jershöft paintings, Schmidt-Rottluff evolved a colorful, flat style of painting that gave his art an overwhelming expression. Zones of pure color intertwine, infusing the surface with a dynamic rhythm. Occasionally, the forms seem to dissolve into an almost abstract color field, although their relationship to the actual motif is always preserved. The artist also uses black contours to define distinct shapes, creating a sense of space due to the arrangement of the individual pictorial elements. The artist describes the fishermen's chores in “Fischer auf der Düne” and their hard work in any weather. Schmidt-Rottluff shows people in expressive movement devoid of the usual physiognomy; these gestures appear for the first time in his works. Nevertheless, an echo of the expressive style of the pre-war period remains in Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's works in the post-war years, although they inspire a much more emotional, less tranquil impression. In the present painting, Schmidt-Rottluff achieved a high degree of formal and chromatic abstraction without losing touch with the visible. In his monograph and catalogue raisonné of Schmidt-Rottluff's work, published in 1956, Will Grohmann, an expert on the artist, characterizes the works created between 1921 and 1923 in the chapter entitled “Color Field and Zone Painting” (Grohmann, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Stuttgart 1956, p. 106).

Fascinating provenance
The art dealer Ferdinand Möller presumably purchased the painting shortly after it was created. Möller, actually a bookseller, began his incredibly successful career in 1912 at the famous Galerie Arnold in Dresden; the then owner Ludwig Gutbier had organized the landmark exhibition of the “Brücke” artists in 1910. In 1913, Möller founded a branch of the Arnold Gallery in Wroclaw, and in October 1918, he opened his own gallery on Potsdamer Strasse in Berlin. The artists he represented included Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Otto Mueller, Emil Nolde, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and others. Like many other paintings by the “Brücke” group, “Fischer auf der Düne” remained in the gallery's possession. In July 1937, the infamous exhibition 'Degenerate Art' opened in Munich; the artworks confiscated from museums were finally legally expropriated on May 1, 1938. In response, Möller gave 19 works, including our painting, to his friend Wilhelm R. Valentiner in Detroit on loan. The German-American art historian had been the Detroit Art Institute director since 1924 and published the first monograph on Karl Schmidt-Rottluff as early as 1920. By the “Vesting Order” of the Department of Justice, Office of Alien Property of October 30, 1950, Möller's collection was confiscated as “enemy property” and taken over as property of the US government. After long and arduous negotiations – Ferdinand Möller died in January 1956 – 17 of the paintings that had initially been sent as loans finally arrived in Cologne, where the gallery had been based since 1951, in January 1958. The family donated two paintings, “Bild mit weißer Form” (1913) by Wassily Kandinsky and “Grüne Brücke” (1916) by Lyonel Feininger, to the Detroit Art Institute and the North Carolina Museum of Arts in Raleigh as a form of compensation. In the end, the painting “Fischer auf der Düne” became part of the renowned Berthold and Else Beitz Collection, Essen, through the agency of the art dealer Wilhelm Grosshennig, who was originally from Chemnitz but settled in Düsseldorf after the GDR had been proclaimed. [MvL]