print
- Museum number
- 1982,0724.22
- Title
- Object: Mensche, auf das Meer blickend
- Description
-
People looking out to sea. 1914
Woodcut
- Production date
- 1914
- Dimensions
-
Height: 400 millimetres
-
Width: 497 millimetres
- $Inscriptions
-
- Curator's comments
- Text from Frances Carey and Antony Griffiths, 'The Print in Germany 1880-1933', BM 1984, no. 99
The year 1914 was one of the high-points in Schmidt-Rotluff's activity as a woodcutter; the fifty prints he made were the largest number of any year, and the quality perhaps the most impressive.
Among them there is a self-contained group of prints of similar subject-matter, showing clothed figures on the shore (cf. Schapire 146, 150-2, 161). Most of them are shown looking out to sea, and this places them in the centre of the tradition of German Romantic painting stemming from Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840) and his contemporaries.
Such pensive and melancholic themes are similar to those found in the works that Heckel was making in the same years, but are far removed from the concerns of Kirchner. After the years of the First World War during which Schmidt-Rottluff hardly created any works of art, he changed course again and made a number of large woodcuts of religious subjects, many of which were published in 1919 in a portfolio by Kurt Wolff Verlag, Munich. These later prints are not included in Carey & Griffiths 1984.
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
-
1984/5 Sep-Jan, BM, 'The Print in Germany 1880-1933', no. 99
1992 Mar-May, Manchester Art Gallery, 'The Expressionist Face...'
- Acquisition date
- 1982
- Department
- Prints and Drawings
- Registration number
- 1982,0724.22
