Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

(German, 1884–1976)

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was a German painter and member of the Expressionist movement Die Brücke. His Self-Portrait with Monocle (1910) is a hallmark example of the vivid color, jagged shapes, and unrefined mark-making for which he is best known. Born Karl Schmidt on December 1, 1884 in Chemnitz, Germany, he enrolled at the Dresden Polytechnic University 1905, where he met fellow architecture students Erich Heckel, Fritz Bleyl, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Together with his peers he founded Die Brücke, a collective workshop for painting, sculpting, and printmaking. The artist added the name of his hometown, Rottluff, that same year. In 1906, he discontinued his architectural studies and devoted himself solely to his painting practice. Throughout the following decades, after the disbanding of Die Brücke in 1913, the artist spent his summers painting on the Baltic coast and teaching at the Prussian Academy in Berlin. In 1936, he was officially prohibited by the Nazi regime from exhibiting his work. In exile till 1947, he returned to Berlin where he lived out the rest of his life, dying at the age of 92 on August 10, 1976. Today, Schmidt-Rottluff’s works are included in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Städel Musuem in Frankfurt am Main, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Albertina in Vienna, among others.