Retrato de Emy

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff created this painting during his first year of marriage to Emy Frisch. It depicts his wife’s face as a bold yet calm mask. The bright colors represent Emy’s lively and confident personality and the artist’s feelings about his wife.

I have no program, only the inner longing to grasp what I see and feel and to find the purest expression for it. I know I can approach these things only through art, rather than thoughts or words.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff

Portrait of Emy shows the influence of the German expressionist and cubist art movements. Both art styles were designed to move away from the Western traditions of making art that looks realistic. Schmidt-Rottluff was one of the founders of the German expressionist art movement. Expressionist artists used abstract shapes, bold lines, and bright colors to communicate their feelings in their work. Cubist artists often simplified a subject into geometric shapes that showed different angles of the subject all at once. Many cubist artists were inspired by African art. In Portrait of Emy, the artist painted his wife’s face to resemble an African mask. 

Schmidt-Rottluff’s wildly colorful artworks were not appreciated by everyone. A reproduction of Portrait of Emy was published in the 1928 book Kunst und Rasse (Art and Race) by Paul Schultz-Naumburg. Schultz-Naumburg’s celebration of “racially pure” Aryan art over “impure” and “sick” modern art influenced the policies of Hitler and the Nazi party. When the Nazis took control of Germany in the 1930s, they believed modern art to be “degenerate,” or immoral. Modern art represented the values the Nazis opposed. They stole, sold, and destroyed tens of thousands of artworks, including more than 600 paintings by Schmidt-Rottluff. The Nazis even displayed works of modern art in what they called the Degenerate Art exhibition. The exhibition was intended to insult and shame the artists.