Word: rottluffs
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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...
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...
...exuberant architectural students turned artists in Dresden in 1905 who called themselves Die Brücke (The Bridge) in the confident expectation that they would "attract all the revolutionary and surging elements." With the "audacious idea of renewing German art" the Bridge group-Ernst Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Fritz Bleyl and later Max Pechstein-set up their studio in an empty shoe store...
...work of "Die Bruecke" three dimensional illusionist painting was severely attacked. Simple contrasts of black and white replaced the attempt to model form by different degrees of color. Taking their inspiration from Medieval and African models, Heckel and Schmidt Rottluff created works of monumental style having an elemental power and an obvious decorative quality. These early pictures of "Die Bruecke" were infused with a catching vitality that was unfortunately soon lost in an insipid and fashionable Ars elegante. Other expressionists like Kollowitz and Kokoschka remained true to the original inspiration. "Woman with Dead Child" is Kollowitz at her best struggling...