![Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - Portrait of Emy [1919]](http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5823/21318782918_09ac9a812d_o.jpg)
This portrait of the artist's young wife still has the power to startle. The strident colours and skull-like visage would seem grotesquely ill suited to the image of a loved one. But Karl Schmidt-Rottluff (German, 1884 - 1976) means no insult to Emy Frisch. Like other German modernists, he had little interest in copying the outward appearance of things: that job was better left to photographers. Art was too serious to merely imitate nature-or even to honour tradition. With all the passion of youth, the artist insisted he was moved only by "an inexplicable yearning to lay hold of what I see and feel and then to find the most direct expression possible for such experience.”
[North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh - Oil on canvas, 71.9 x 65.4 cm]