Two Girls in a Garden

Two Girls in a Garden — Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. 1914.

Medium: Oil on canvas. Dimensions: 100.3 × 86.4 cm (39 1/2 × 34 in.).

Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was a founding member of Brücke (Bridge). Formed in 1905 in Dresden, the group sought to forge an art that would be a bridge to Germany’s great artistic past. Brücke renounced academic painting and promoted a more intuitive approach that drew on non-Western and outsider sources. The intentionally rough and angular style of Two Girls in a Garden demonstrates Schmidt-Rottluff’s interest in African sculpture, which he studied in the Dresden Ethnographic Museum. To combat the devolution of modern society, the members of Brücke praised nature and frequently communed together in the countryside. Though by 1914 Schmidt-Rottluff had moved to Berlin, nature would remain an important source of inspiration in his art.

Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.