Christian Rohlfs

Christian Rohlfs was a German expressionist artist. Rohlfs took up painting as a teenager. He began his formal artistic education in Berlin, before moving to the Weimar Academy. Initially he would be identified as a classical 19th century artist working through a variety of academic, naturalist, Impressionist, and Post-Impressionist styles.In 1901 Christian Rohlfs left Weimar for Hagen, when Karl Ernst Osthaus – the important patron of avant garde art and founder of the Folkwang Museum - had offered him a studio in the modern art museum. Meetings with Edvard Munch and working alongside Emil Nolde as well as the experience of seeing the works of Vincent van Gogh inspired him to move towards the expressionist style, in which he would work for the rest of his career.In 1908, at the age of 60, he began with graphic works after being introduced to lithographs, woodcuts and etchings by the expressionist group Die Brücke. He went on to make 185 in total, almost all woodcuts or linocuts often overworking them in different techniques such as watercolor or crayon.The town of Hagen already opened the Christian Rohlfs Musem in 1929. In 1937 the Nazis removed all his works from public collections and showed some of these pieces in the infamous “Degenerate Art” show. He was also expelled from the Prussian Academy of Arts.The Christian Rohlfs Museum in Hagen still exists caring for the artist’s oeuvre.