A new museum in a village on the western fringe of Chemnitz, past stables where horses munch placidly on hay, honours one of this eastern German city’s most famous sons: the artist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, a founder of the Brücke group of Expressionists.
The 1905 founding of the Brücke in a disused shoemaker’s shop in Dresden by four young artists determined to shock the bourgeoisie out of its complacency is a widely recognised milestone in the history of German art. It is less well known that the group’s origins lie about an hour drive to the west of Dresden, in Chemnitz. The families of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff and Erich Heckel all lived in the city; the latter two began their lifelong friendship at a high-school art club there in 1902. The fourth founding member, Fritz Bleyl, came from nearby Zwickau. (Max Pechstein, Emil Nolde, Otto Mueller and Cuno Amiet joined the Brücke later.)
Born in 1884, Karl Schmidt grew up on the mill run by his father. (In 1905 he added Rottluff to his name, the village on the outskirts of Chemnitz where he spent his childhood, to avoid confusion with any number of other Karl Schmidts.) His parents moved into the neighbouring house they had built in 1913, the year the Brücke dissolved. Schmidt-Rottluff, by then living in Berlin, visited regularly; when he and his wife Emy were forced to abandon their bombed-out Berlin apartment in September 1943, they found refuge in his parents’ home for three years.
Chemnitz, which lays claim to the biggest collection of Schmidt-Rottluff’s work after Berlin’s Brücke-Museum, acquired the house in 2023 and opened it to the public in April. The breadth of works on display in Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Haus encompasses both the pre- and post-Brücke stages of the artist’s career, as well as works by fellow Brücke artists.
Delicate sensibility
Many early works have never been shown before, in part because Schmidt-Rottluff himself dismissed them as “schoolboy stuff”, says Sabine Maria Schmidt, a curator of the museum. A 1902 work showing a city view through a window in restrained watercolours, for instance, reveals a delicate sensibility for light and reflection, and seems far removed from the vibrant colours, energetic lines and bold compositions associated with his later oil paintings.
After the First World War, Schmidt-Rottluff became one of the most celebrated artists in Germany, but, like the other former members of the Brücke, was branded “degenerate” by the Nazis. More than 600 of his works were seized from German museums and several were shown in the 1937 Munich “Degenerate Art” exhibition. Schmidt-Rottluff was banned from painting and turned mainly to watercolour and drawing. But one oil self-portrait painted secretly in 1944 is on view in the museum—in the house where it was produced. In reds, blues and yellows it shows the artist wearing an anxious expression, as though worried he might get caught.
Schmidt-Rottluff’s Selbstbildnis was painted secretly in 1944 in the house that is now a museum of his work
© VG; Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2025
Unlike many of his peers who were also condemned by the Nazis, Schmidt-Rottluff revived his career after the Second World War, and it continued for another 30 years until his death in 1976, at the age of 91. His first post-war exhibition, in the autumn of 1946, was, fittingly, in Chemnitz; 50 watercolours he had painted during the war and afterwards were shown at the Schlossbergmuseum. He also became a professor at Berlin’s University of Fine Arts.
In 1955, five of Schmidt-Rottluff’s paintings were shown at the first Documenta exhibition in Kassel, intended to signal to the world that Germany had drawn a line under the Nazi era. He helped establish the Brücke-Museum, founded in West Berlin in 1967, and continued to acquire and donate works to it.
Aside from the works at the new museum, many more paintings are on display at the Chemnitz Art Collections’ main museum. There is also a wonderful 1926 Kirchner oil on loan from Deutsche Bank, which shows Chemnitz as a forest of chimneys, columns of smoke and towers of churches and the town hall. In deep violets, midnight blue, brick reds, yellow and pale green, it is a vivid reminder of the city’s industrial past.
