Crouching Woman, 1911

About the Work

This woodcut is full of movement: in the rhythmic riveting of the woman’s unstable-looking pose and the abstract structure of the background. Schmidt-Rottluff’s woodcut œuvre reached a pinnacle in 1911, as did his work in the wooden sculpture medium that had gotten underway in Dangast in those years. The relief “Two Female Nudes” (Brücke-Museum, Berlin) and the woodcut “Crouching Woman” are thus intimately interrelated – not only in terms of format but also from the formal point of view. They are both based on the perceptive study of the naked human body in natural movement, one of the core concerns of Brücke art.

About the Acquisition

From 1900 onwards, the Frankfurt chemist and industrialist Carl Hagemann (1867‒1940) assembled one of the most important private collections of modern art. It included numerous paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints, especially by members of the artist group “Die Brücke”. After Carl Hagemann died in an accident during the Second World War, the then Städel director Ernst Holzinger arranged for Hagemann’s heirs to evacuate his collection with the museum’s collection. In gratitude, the family donated almost all of the works on paper to the Städel Museum in 1948. Further donations and permanent loans as well as purchases of paintings and watercolours from the Hagemann estate helped to compensate for the losses the museum had suffered in 1937 as part of the Nazi’s “Degenerate Art” campaign. Today, the Hagemann Collection forms the core of the Städel museum’s Expressionist collection.