Word: heckel
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Heckel in his 20s was a bursting bomb. With Kirchner and Schmidt-Rottluff, he worked in a studio that had once been a cobbler's shop in the working-class district of Dresden. Since the three young artists were in revolt against convention, including the hiring of professional models, they painted their own girl friends in the nude; at any one time three or four of these young ladies might be milling in happy nakedness around the kerosene stove, on which a pot of coffee was always steaming. The artists worked at any hour of the day or night...
...them and the medieval guilds in which craft secrets were discovered, developed and guarded. The expressionism that the young artists developed was a milestone in modern German art-an emotion-packed way of painting that still has much of its original impact. Most of the 165 graphic works by Heckel now on view in Stuttgart come from these vintage years...
Some of the works display the influence of African and Asian art, and some seem to combine the thick, blunt lines of Gothic woodcuts with the vi brant tendrils of art nouveau. Com pared to the primitive force of some expressionists, Heckel's forms have been described as "lyrical and refined." But taken alone, their chief characteristic is a searing fury-a world of distorted faces and figures as throbbing as Van Gogh's and as pain-racked as Munch...
...medic in World War I, Heckel kept his sketchbook close to him, recorded in blistering strokes the wounded and the insane, the sight of bombed-out villages and bands of homeless orphans. As the gallery's Erwin Petermann, the arranger of the show, says: "Heckel is still as provocative as anything an angry young man of today will concoct, with the difference that instead of showing one's disdain in burlap and trash, or manifesting one's revulsion in painted soup-can labels, his work shows the roughness of life in realistic exclamation marks...
...tended to paint rather alike. They all did carmine-red houses, crimson trees, ultramarine roads, faces that were part chrome yellow and part cobalt blue. They had no liking for the impressionists, who saw a pear in a bowl as having many different shades of green. "For us," says Heckel, "it was a green pear-bang-in a red bowl." They also scorned impressionist garden paintings that "could just as well have been shifted a few yards to the right or left in the choice of the scene to be shown." The Germans were after a complete and total effect...