Martel Schwichtenberg gained renown in the late 1920s for a series of portraits of her sophisticated friends in the Berlin avant-garde. But the majority of her work from that decade, like the paintings seen here, was more modest. The flattened modeling and blocky passages of color demonstrate the influence of German Expressionists, such as members of the Brücke (Bridge) and Blaue Reiter (Blue Rider) groups, who were drawn to primitivism and non-naturalistic color. In Frauen vor dem Haus, Schwichtenberg abstracted the faces and bodies of the peasant women into seemingly masked, anonymous forms. Their otherworldliness, as well as that of the trees and houses in the seaside town depicted in Blühende Waldbäume II (1941.677), conveys the relative exoticism of rural German life for an urbanite like Schwichtenberg.