Footpath (Parkweg)

Schmidt-Rottluff began painting landscapes in 1907 at Dangast in Oldenburg, a German spa not far from the North Sea coast. He returned there in 1911 and stayed for much of the summer, painting Footpath. This work employs bold simplification of natural forms, elimination of incidental details, an emphatically flat picture surface, nearly unbroken fields of primary colors, and strong, black outlines—all characteristics of German Expressionism. The colors may reflect the artist’s perception of the natural effects of an unusually prolonged heat wave in Germany that summer. Returning to Oldenburg in mid-August from a four-week sojourn in Norway, he wrote, “Dangast looks disconsolate, like November, and all grass red-yellow.” The painting was bequeathed to the museum from Wilhelm Valentiner, formerly the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts; he was Schmidt-Rottluff’s close friend and the earliest champion of his work.