In the present watercolor ""Zwischen den Vorhängen", Karl Schmidt-Rottluff created a composition based on unusually strong contrasts and with a strong emphasis on the vertical. Through the flower with its jagged leaves accentuated in green and blue, he guides the beholder's eye from a foreground framed by black curtains into the brightly lit center and opens the view into the distance. As is so characteristic of the artist's late work, the watercolor offers a glimpse into his private environment, into the rooms and objects of his everyday life. They are a personal dialog with the objects, accounts of the formal beauty of things and an examination of their nature. "I believe that most paintings are about processes," Schmidt-Rottluff once wrote, "I always wanted to show the essence and the quiet life of things." (Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, 1960). In just a few words, he sums up the special expressiveness of his still lifes. In his late watercolors in particular, however, there is often a further, spiritual level that goes beyond the pure apprehension of the object. The view from the interior into a more or less defined outside world, known throughout art history, is referenced in " Zwischen den Vorhängen" and also emphasized by the unusually strong contrast of light and dark. The increasing fragmentation of the line and the abstraction of the object in the late creative phase results in new, atmospheric spaces where the boundary between the representational and the spiritual can no longer be clearly identified. [AR]