Artist
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff 1884 – 1976

About the work
In his portrait of art historian Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner (1880–1958) Schmidt-Rottluff was depicting a figure who approached the art of the avant-garde openly and without prejudice, and one who remained its enduring sponsor. Originally best acquainted with seventeenth-century art (his Ph.D. dissertation was on Rembrandt), Valentiner was appointed curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1907 at the recommendation of Wilhelm von Bode. He returned to Germany at the beginning of the First World War to volunteer for military service, and began championing modern art at the end of the war. In 1920 he wrote the first monograph to appear on Schmidt-Rottluff. He also made an essential contribution both to propagating Expressionist art and to its acceptance. There was a lifelong connection between Schmidt-Rottluff and Valentiner, one that endured even after the latter’s return to the United States. One of Valentiner’s major achievements was to organise an exhibition of contemporary German art at Anderson Galleries in New York as early as 1923, together with art dealer Ferdinand Moller. In the year this exhibition took place Schmidt-Rottluff made not one but two woodcut portraits of this expert on art. Such a detailed background is unusual for the artist. The still life seen on the wall at the left and the head of a woman on the bottom right, seemingly an African sculpture, are presumably attributes referencing the profession of the person portrayed. His large, wide-open eyes with their white pupils are fixed alertly on the viewer. This white-line woodcut pays tribute to its subject’s spirit and presence.

Catalog raisonné
Schapire H 298