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From its title Woman’s Head and Mask, this work, painted by Karl Schmidt-Rottluff in Berlin in 1912, promises an explicitness the composition seems to lack. Let’s hear curator Birgit Dalbajewa on the rather mysterious nature of this work:

“Interestingly, in the final analysis, you can’t actually decide what you see. Is the woman really holding a mask in her hand? Or is it a man’s and woman’s face juxtaposed – after all, the forms of the woman’s face are just as simplified. It is also broken down into a few basic shapes – a nose looking as if it were carved, and remarkably simple eye sockets with the eyes closed. In that sense, through this radically reduced, broken cubist and prismatic fields of colour, Schmidt-Rottluff juxtaposes a man and woman, creating a very condensed dialogue – her eyes are closed, and the mask has, in any case, no direct gaze. And this critical exploration of relationships between men and women was a topic of great interest in those years – and something artists were also very interested in. So, without making too much of it, this work offers vastly different levels of interpretation.”

At that time, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff was fascinated by the rough abstraction of African masks. He was also influenced by French Cubism, which he had first seen in the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne the same year he painted this work. He was impressed by the multiple perspectives of one and the same object in works by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. In addition, Schmitt-Rottluff's art included the strong pure colours so characteristic of works by the Brücke group of artists. Here, yellow is juxtaposed with blue, green and red. In a gentle symbiosis, Schmidt-Rottluff fuses all these elements into a depiction of a woman and a man – or a woman and a mask?