Portrait of Emy, 1919

About the Work

Schmidt-Rottluff was married to the photographer Emmy Leonie Frisch (1884–1975), whose nickname was Emy. A conspicuous feature of the portraits he made of her in 1919 are the differently depicted eyes. It is a recurring motif in the artist’s oeuvre. Typically, one eye is nearly closed, the other emblematically wide open. As already contemporary critics observed, these disparate eyes invite interpretation as meditative immersion on the one hand and visionariness on the other – that is, the inward- and the outward-directed gaze. At the same time, the motif echoes with a fundamental, existential dualism: light and dark, day and night, life and death, past and future.

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.