13 Facts About Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was a German expressionist painter and printmaker; he was one of the four founders of the artist group Die Brucke.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff attended the humanistische gymnasium in Chemnitz, where he befriended Erich Heckel.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff enrolled in architecture at the Sachsische Technische Hochschule in Dresden in 1905, following in Heckel's footsteps, but gave up after one term.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff spent the summer of that year on the island of Alsen with Emil Nolde, where he convinced him to join Die Brucke.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's works stood out from his peers because of their balance of composition and simple form, which together served to exaggerate their flatness.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff spent 1910 painting some of his most infamous landscape works that received recognition and fame.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff began to adopt more subdued coloring and placed greater emphasis in his pictures on draughtsmanship, which featured dark, contrasting lines between shapes rather than juxtaposing colors, which had previously been the norm.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff served as a soldier on the Eastern Front from 1915 until 1918, but these experiences never heavily reflected in his artwork.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's angular, contrasting style became more colorful and looser in the early 1920s, and by the mid-1920s he began to evolve into flat shapes with gentle outlines.

The rewards and honors Karl Schmidt-Rottluff received after World War I, as Expressionism gained recognition in Germany, were stripped from him after the rise to power of the Nazi Party.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933, two years after his admission In 1937,608 of Schmidt-Rottluff's paintings were seized from museums by the Nazis and several of them shown in exhibitions of "degenerate art".

In 1947, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was appointed professor at the University of Arts in Berlin-Charlottenburg, where he would go on to have a great influence on the new generation of German artists.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was a prolific artist, with 300 woodcuts, 105 lithographs, 70 etchings, and 78 commercial prints described in Rosa Schapire's Catalogue raisonne.