Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - "Summer morning sun".... Lot 738

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - "Summer morning sun". Watercolor and ink on strong watercolor paper. (19)63. Approx. 50 x 70 cm. Signed lower left and with the work number "6348". Verso titled and inscribed "67/73". - Characteristic work, which shows Schmidt-Rottluff's interest in different lighting conditions - Light-flooded and large-format landscape - The watercolor counts in the late work of the artist to his most important painterly medium The watercolor technique accompanies Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in his artistic activity from the beginning and becomes especially in his late work to his most important medium, after he had to give up oil painting in 1963 due to age. He intensively explored the influence of color and light as compositional elements. Summer Morning Sun" is also one of these late works and shows how powerfully Schmidt-Rottluff was able to depict landscapes in large-format watercolor. What is remarkable here is that Schmidt-Rottluff paints just the titular sun as a blank space only with a black outline and completely without color, glistening brightly and with a pale pink halo it shines down on the static-looking landscape. "Special lighting conditions and light situations play a prominent role in Schmidt-Rottluff's postwar work and are a key to its interpretation. 'Light acts most vividly,' Will Grohmann stated as early as 1956 in the first monograph on the artist. Thus Schmidt-Rottluff created corresponding moods and with picture titles such as 'Morgendämmerung' (1958) or 'Nachmittagssonne' (1963) (or the 'Sommermorgensonne' of 1963 offered here) referred specifically to the moment of time, as a time of day or season. And it is the light that dissolves the contours in the pictures and increasingly dematerializes the objects. In the process, the disembodiment of the objects was countered by their energetic charge. Thus the landscape depictions in particular become metaphors of growth and energy. With these supra-temporal categories, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff responded to an increasing desensualization of a modern industrialized world. This was countered by the world order of nature with its ever-recurring vitality, which the painter captured in his pictures. Schmidt-Rottluff was not alone in this, but very close to the so-called nature-magic school around the lyricists Oskar Loerke (1884-1941) and Wilhelm Lehmann (1882-1968). (...) These artists came from the same generation and they were united by the search for meaning through the cycle of nature." (Marc Gundel, Expressionismus und Naturverbundenheit nach 1945, in: Ausst.-Kat. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Reiner Ausdruck, Städtische Museen Heilbronn, Munich 2015, p. 123 f.). Provenance: private collection, southern Germany, acquired directly from the artist in 1970; Lempertz, Cologne 3.6.2016, lot 334; private property, Bavaria. Taxation: Differentially taxed VAT: Margin Scheme