Girl Before a Mirror, 1914

About the Work

Creating a sense of space and – thanks to the shaded zones – three-dimensionality, this woodcut depicts a female nude before a mirror. For the woman’s body, the artist seems to have taken orientation from African cult objects; the mirror image distorts it even further. The face is more masklike than natural – a stylistic device that, frequently encountered in Schmidt-Rottluff’s works from 1914 onward, already anticipates his pursuits in the sculpture medium.

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.