One of the most beautiful offerings at the Winter Antiques Show was a woodcut by Karl Schmidt-Routloff, titled "Bildnis G" (Portrait of Guttman), presented by Hill-Stone. Lesley Hill and Alan Stone are dealers that possess that rare ability in which aesthetics and academics are served with equal gusto.
From Hill-Stone:
"One of the principal figures of German Expressionism, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff founded in 1905, together with his friends, Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner and Erich Heckel, the artistic movement which they called Die Brücke, whose aim was to sever connections with the traditional art of the past. In these aims the group found kindred spirits in the French Fauves whose flat planes of color and brutal dissonances of form and color were taken up by the members of Die Brücke.
Although the group did not remain together for long – by 1913 their association was for all intents and purposes over – their efforts in combination and as individual artists created a new kind of art which even in the face of middle-class hostility, had influential proponents.
Schmidt-Rottluff was a prime mover in the rediscovery of the artistic potential of the woodcut. No doubt influenced by the woodcuts of Gauguin, who himself had only died in 1903, Schmidt-Rottluff had begun to make his own woodcuts by 1909. They took the simplification of form already visible in Gauguin’s examples even further.
The jagged linear energy of Schmidt-Rottluff’s woodcuts had yet another important source: the esthetic discovery of tribal sculpture of Africa. The European colonization of the continent had occasioned an ethnographic interest in this material; by the first years of the new century artists and collectors began to appreciate the immediacy and talismanic force of this sculpture and Schmidt-Rottluff was eager to incorporate these forms into his woodcuts. In fact, it can be no accident that it was African wood sculpture that impelled the artist to use wood blocks as his chosen matrix, as he often used the wood grain of his blocks as an element in the design of the woodcuts."
