Christian Rohlfs

(German, 1849–1938)

Christian Rohlfs was a pioneering German Expressionist painter and printmaker. Best known for his painterly approach to rendering, Rohlfs’ earlier artistic styles span across Naturalism, Impressionism, and Post-Impressionism before his encounter with Vincent van Gogh’s work, which would profoundly influence his technique for the rest of his career. A contemporary of the Expressionist group Die Brücke, Rohlfs' paintings and woodcuts contain a wide variety of subjects, including landscapes, portraits, still lifes, and street scenes. Around 1900, he began painting with Emil Nolde, and was also influenced by the spontaneous and emotional quality of his friend’s work. Rohlfs was born in Niendorf, Germany on December 22, 1849, and before his death in Hagen, Westfalia on January 8, 1938, he enjoyed both praise and despair, with the town of Hagen opening a Rohlfs Museum in 1929 and the subsequent condemnation as a degenerate and removal of his works from public collections by the Nazis in 1937. Today, his paintings can be found in numerous institutions around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Folkwang Museum in Germany, and the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Spain.