Ships in Port

From the beginning of his artistic career, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was fond of the woodcut technique, namely for its possibilities of visual expression. After the Die Brücke group was disbanded in 1911, he spent three months in the village of Nida in the Curonian Spit - a region between Lithuania and Russia. In his Nida prints, the stylistic idiom indicated in his prints from the previous year, in which Rottluff contemplates Cubism, reached its peak. The landscape elements are rendered in solid, dark contour lines or planes. The composition’s geometric order is contrasted with the relaxed picture framework that shuns right angles. The tension thus created is enhanced by the dynamic hatching of the cut lines. The Ships at Port are the artist’s most peaceful landscape treatment of that period, with the largest number of incised lines. By emphasizing the white planes, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff achieved a luminous effect and the impression of a sunny day.