Art-Therapy

Karl Schmid felt teaching as a mission and, at the same time, believed in the saving power of art. Many times he combined these qualities to help people overcome difficult situations or cope better with their handicaps, putting into practice the theories of art therapy born in the 1940s.

An early example is a painting from the 1950s entitled, "Colours for my mute daughter." Karl Schmid asked his daughter, who could not speak at the time, to mix pigments and at the same time taught her the names of the colours.

On other occasions Karl Schmid made sketches to help a young disabled woman make tapestries as an exercise of art therapy. Two examples can be seen below. On the left side you can see the sketch made by Karl Schmid while on the right side the tapestry created by the girl.

Art therapy, however, was not only a means of helping others. In some situations Karl Schmid also used it to favour his own healing, as the following example shows:

This small painted collage, from the 1960s, was made by the artist during one of his many hospitalisations at a sanatorium in Davos (Switzerland), where he often went to treat tuberculosis from which he had been suffering since the 1930s.

In the mostly abstract composition, you can notice the shape of a house.

This is probably the same house where his friend Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had ended his days in 1938, and which Karl Schmid could see from the window of his room in the sanatorium. Kirchner was also suffering from the same disease. By the 1930s, their shared suffering and love for art had given rise to a great friendship between the two, despite their age difference.