Word: heckel
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Still at Work. When the Bridge broke up, the original artists developed their own strong individual styles, but all were lumped together as "decadents" by the Nazis. Heckel may have suffered the most: more than 700 of his pictures were yanked from museums, many of them to be burned or hacked to pieces, and when an Allied bomb destroyed his house, it destroyed a large part of what remained of his life's work...
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...
...these blows did not destroy Heckel. A spry, kindly eyed old man, he still paints, turning out about ten canvases a year that are light and lyrical and full of pleasing harmonies. "What intrigues me is the secret of color relations. The excitement of this has never ceased, and perhaps that is what keeps me going," he says. And: "Nature has provided for youth to scale heights and break walls. It is for the old to exploit what has been gained...