Kristus, 1918

About the Work

During World War I, Schmidt-Rottluff developed an interest in religious themes. In Lithuania, he produced a series of nine woodcuts that were published as a portfolio by the Kurt-Wolff-Verlag in Munich in December 1918. He took the motifs primarily from the New Testament, but they do not tell a continuous story. On the contrary, the artist chose subjects that, somewhat freely interpreted, are concerned with faith, love and trust, but also betrayal. He inscribed the year 1918 on the brow of the iconically depicted head of Christ. His contemporaries regarded the strongly simplified form of the typified countenance, with its one eye wide open and the other closed, as a great provocation. Schmidt-Rottluff gave the world-weary disciple his own facial features.

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.