Word: heckel
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...Erich Heckel is old-80 this week. The vital and violent movement that he and two colleagues, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and the late Ernst Kirchner, started nearly six decades ago is now a part of both history and legend. There is proof, in a current show of Heckel's work in the stately main hall of the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie, that passion and emotion once flamed as hotly in this old man as ever in any iconoclastic rebel. But he now lives quietly and serenely in an orchard-ringed farmhouse on Lake Constance, sometimes reminiscing about a youth that...
...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...
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...