.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Sternenandacht (Star Worship) is one of the finest and most resonating of a rare and important group of cosmic expressionist paintings made by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff at the end of the Great War in anticipation of the birth of a new, more hopeful, just, egalitarian and spiritual age of man. Formerly in the collection of the distinguished patron of Die Brücke art, Carl Hagemann, the painting was one of the leading works that Schmidt-Rottluff exhibited at the major one-man exhibition of his work held at the Galerie Ferdinand Möller in Berlin in December 1919.
At the end of the First World War, Schmidt-Rottluff – one of the leading exponents of expressionist painting in Germany – was one of the first artists to immediately set about allying his work to the new utopian spirit of optimism that for a brief period, between 1918 and 1920, greeted the end of hostilities. Immediately signing up to the workers’ council Arbeitsrat für Kunst, which sought to place art at the centre of the Soviet revolution then taking place in Germany, Schmidt-Rottluff began to paint strong, deeply spiritualised and manifestly simple pictures that invoked a cosmic sense of man’s essential purpose and destiny in the world. Images of levitating figures interacting with the sun, the moon and the stars proliferated in so much of the expressionist art of this time that the style became known as Cosmic Expressionism, though Will Grohmann referred to Schmidt-Rottluff’s paintings of this period as the artist’s ‘numinous pictures’. Of these, Schmidt-Rottluff’s Sternenandacht is arguably the most powerful and certainly the most iconic example.
With its depiction of two levitating figures tripping over the rooftops of a town following the cosmic rhythm of the stars, the painting is a bold vision of a sacred, peaceful and ultimately unified humanity living in accord with their surroundings - a picture of the world as it should be rather than the fractured mess that characterised the post-war reality in Germany. It is also a work that directly relates to and may well have inspired one of the other great images of Cosmic Expressionism: Conrad Felixmüller’s famous graphic lament to the murders of the Sparticist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Menschen über der Welt. This was the picture that adorned the cover of the magazine Die Aktion in July 1919, depicting the murdered revolutionaries transcending the world while following the light of a single star shining over the rooftops of Berlin. As Felixmüller wrote in an essay that he dedicated to Schmidt-Rottluff at this time, it was the simple directness, honesty and truthful values of the artist’s inner vision, as expressed in works like Sternanandacht, that stood like a beacon of light for many of his generation at this time. ‘Schmidt-Rottluff - is no star - he does not twinkle. He is reality: the flesh and spirit of our Earth. He is a rock standing out from the mud of our time. Hard, large and determined in his form... [He] stands over us like the sun and radiates his glow over the Earth like the sun at midday: vertical, upright, still. Against the filth of a banal, stupid and quarrelsome Earth. He is peace and unity. From him emanates the power and good of our nature - and we, through him, will become aware of the great unity, that forces us to be loving towards humans, animals, trees, earth, sun, moon, stars. That is how his human figures speak to [their] brothers and sisters. In his heads one sees eternity. A fixed gaze rests within itself; looks into itself; is similarly unmovable. [An] invitation to the complete dedication to and consistency with the idea of freedom from inhumane suffering [and] inhumane systems. We are in essence our [own] beings as we should be: Schmidt-Rottluff is the manifestation of our will and ambition. Liberation from the lot of a slave, living men - the godlike essence of world creation - for the intensity of his body and his spirit in freedom’ (C. Felixmüller, ’Schmidt-Rottluff’, in Menschen, vol. 2, no. 5, July 1919, p. 1, reproduced in C. Felixmüller, Conrad Felixmüller: Von ihm, über ihn, Dusseldorf, 1977, p. 25).
At the end of the First World War, Schmidt-Rottluff – one of the leading exponents of expressionist painting in Germany – was one of the first artists to immediately set about allying his work to the new utopian spirit of optimism that for a brief period, between 1918 and 1920, greeted the end of hostilities. Immediately signing up to the workers’ council Arbeitsrat für Kunst, which sought to place art at the centre of the Soviet revolution then taking place in Germany, Schmidt-Rottluff began to paint strong, deeply spiritualised and manifestly simple pictures that invoked a cosmic sense of man’s essential purpose and destiny in the world. Images of levitating figures interacting with the sun, the moon and the stars proliferated in so much of the expressionist art of this time that the style became known as Cosmic Expressionism, though Will Grohmann referred to Schmidt-Rottluff’s paintings of this period as the artist’s ‘numinous pictures’. Of these, Schmidt-Rottluff’s Sternenandacht is arguably the most powerful and certainly the most iconic example.
With its depiction of two levitating figures tripping over the rooftops of a town following the cosmic rhythm of the stars, the painting is a bold vision of a sacred, peaceful and ultimately unified humanity living in accord with their surroundings - a picture of the world as it should be rather than the fractured mess that characterised the post-war reality in Germany. It is also a work that directly relates to and may well have inspired one of the other great images of Cosmic Expressionism: Conrad Felixmüller’s famous graphic lament to the murders of the Sparticist leaders Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, Menschen über der Welt. This was the picture that adorned the cover of the magazine Die Aktion in July 1919, depicting the murdered revolutionaries transcending the world while following the light of a single star shining over the rooftops of Berlin. As Felixmüller wrote in an essay that he dedicated to Schmidt-Rottluff at this time, it was the simple directness, honesty and truthful values of the artist’s inner vision, as expressed in works like Sternanandacht, that stood like a beacon of light for many of his generation at this time. ‘Schmidt-Rottluff - is no star - he does not twinkle. He is reality: the flesh and spirit of our Earth. He is a rock standing out from the mud of our time. Hard, large and determined in his form... [He] stands over us like the sun and radiates his glow over the Earth like the sun at midday: vertical, upright, still. Against the filth of a banal, stupid and quarrelsome Earth. He is peace and unity. From him emanates the power and good of our nature - and we, through him, will become aware of the great unity, that forces us to be loving towards humans, animals, trees, earth, sun, moon, stars. That is how his human figures speak to [their] brothers and sisters. In his heads one sees eternity. A fixed gaze rests within itself; looks into itself; is similarly unmovable. [An] invitation to the complete dedication to and consistency with the idea of freedom from inhumane suffering [and] inhumane systems. We are in essence our [own] beings as we should be: Schmidt-Rottluff is the manifestation of our will and ambition. Liberation from the lot of a slave, living men - the godlike essence of world creation - for the intensity of his body and his spirit in freedom’ (C. Felixmüller, ’Schmidt-Rottluff’, in Menschen, vol. 2, no. 5, July 1919, p. 1, reproduced in C. Felixmüller, Conrad Felixmüller: Von ihm, über ihn, Dusseldorf, 1977, p. 25).