Paul Ferdinand Schmidt

German curator and critic Paul Ferdinand Schmidt distinguished himself though his advocacy and patronage of Expressionism in Germany.

After completing a degree in law, Schmidt studied medieval architecture at the University of Strasbourg, where he completed a dissertation on the monastery at Maulbronn in 1903. Shortly thereafter he took a position at the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum (today known as the Kulturhistorisches Museum) in Magdeburg, where he directed the print room and, by 1912, served as assistant to the Director. At this time he became interested in the artist group Die Brücke and as early as 1905 (the year of their founding) he purchased prints by the artists for the museum’s collection. In 1910 he became a “passive” member of Die Brücke, which was a special designation given to supporters and collectors of the group. Schmidt’s 1911 article in Das Rheinland, “Die Expressionisten,” offered one of the earliest defenses of Expressionism and was reprinted in Der Sturm the following year. After his departure from the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, Schmidt relocated to Munich, where, together with Max Dietzel, he ran the gallery Der Neue Kunstsalon, which specialized in Expressionist canvases and works of Picasso’s Blue Period. In 1919, Schmidt was appointed director of the Dresden Stadtmuseum, a position he held until 1923.

During the early 1920s, Schmidt published on a range of topics in German art. He authored books on Biedermeier painting (1921) and landscapes at the turn of the nineteenth century (1922), and wrote a monographic study of Philipp Otto Runge (1923); at the same time, he published Die Kunst der Gegenwart (Contemporary Art; 1922, repr. 1926) and a monograph on Otto Dix (1923), a painter for whom Schmidt sat in 1921 (the portrait is now at the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart). After 1924 Schmidt lived in Berlin and supported himself primarily through his writing until 1933, when the cultural climate became increasingly inhospitable for supporters of modern art (soon to be labeled entartete Kunst, or “degenerate art,” by the Nazis). During World War II, he relocated to a small village in Bavaria where he spent the remainder of his life. Following the war, after almost two decades outside of public life, Schmidt published his Geschichte der modernen Malerei (History of Modern Painting, 1952).