Word: heckel
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Oscar Kokoschka rebels against the austerity of early Expresisonist geometricism. (This style, incidentally, is well illustrated in the exhibit by Heckel's Couple and August Macke's strident Three Female Nudes.) Kokoschka's glowing, passionate lithographs, based on religious themes, have a piety to them that the harsher variants of Expressionism could not possibly allow. The culminating work of this fine show is the superb portrait of the famed German director Max Reinhardt; it glows with the tempestuousness and conviction of genius...
...wonder that Heckel's two almost-poetic canvasses express less than they should, that their statement of color is raw, that their organization is dubious. The same equanimity is lacking. Only the idiom is changed. It is no surprise that Schlemmer's canvas lacks the aristocracy of truly resolved expression. One can even understand how Otto Muller's canvas of the gal who lost her Maiden-form, can get by, utterly lacking, as it is, in substance and the very minimum diginity a work of art ought to possess...
...Paul Schuster Art Gallery is displaying now a good cross section of the woodcuts of Shiko Munakata, preeminent among modern Japanese printmakers. From this show, it is plain that Munakata has much in common with Western graphic artists, especially the Expressionists Nolde and Heckel. At the same time, Munakata does not deny his Oriental heritage; the masterful balance of simple forms, a famous feature of old Japanese prints, can be found in almost every work of this exhibit...
Perhaps most ironic is the extent to which this exhibition reveals the influence of French art to which German expressionism has lately been opposed, especially the poetically inclined canvases of Erich Heckel. Karl Schmidt-Rottluff's Fauve period Harbor Scene is a product of the movement dominated by Matisse and is a canvas far superior to Schmidt-Rottluff's two later, extremely ungainly, still-lifes. And Jawlensky's Head of a Woman pays tacit tribute both to Matisse and Rouault...
...Recalls Heckel: "We had no patience with the impressionists, who saw the pear in the bowl as having a hundred different shades of green. For us it was a green pear-bang-in a red bowl. We wanted to shock the person who looked at the picture. Looking at one of Kirchners women-on-the-street pictures, he should feel an erotic sensation, or repulsion, in any case some strong nervous response. Looking at one of Schmidt-Rottluffs monumental, somber compositions, he was supposed to feel touched, moved, overwhelmed...