Lot Essay
Following the example of Max Pechstein, Heckel spent the spring of 1909 in Italy, visiting Rome, Florence, Ravenna and Fiesole. He returned to Dresden in time to help hang the Brücke exhibition at the Galerie Emil Richter in June, having been a founder member of the group in 1905. In the summer, he joined Kirchner and Doris 'Dodo' Grosse (see lot 101) at the Moritzburg Lakes and then, in September, met Schmidt-Rottluff and Rosa Schapire at Dangast.
Dangast was a small fishing-village on the marshy lands of the Jadebusen inlet of the North Sea. Heckel spent several summers there with Schmidt-Rottluff, and according to Gustav Schiefler, the Hamburg lawyer who was amongst the Brücke's early and most supportive patrons, it was where he "discovered a feeling for the expansiveness of space and the corporeality of the sky; the sea and its atmosphere communicated both these to him ... Objects submitted to the totality of the surroundings to such a degree that space, air, and light appear as the actual carriers of the sensation" (G. Schiefler, 'Erich Heckels graphisches Werk', Das Kunstblatt, vol. II, no. 9, 1918, p. 286).
Dangaster Landschaft was painted during the most intense and inventive period of collaboration between Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff. It shows their development away from the influence of Neo-Impressionism and van Gogh, which had characterized much of Heckel's work up to 1908, to a much more spontaneous approach. The heavy impasto of his earlier works has given way to a flatter, clearer manner of painting. Furthermore, Anton Henze has noted how at this time Heckel started diluting his paints with varnish or even paraffin, experimenting with ground pigments and attempting to devise a kind of thin distemper that might suit his increasingly rapid and impulsive brushwork (A. Henze, Erich Heckel, Leben und Werk, Stuttgart/Zurich, 1983, pp. 26-7).
Professor Magdalena Moeller has described how Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff "had a sense of liberation when they were painting together, and they dashed works off...in an intoxication of creativity" (Van Gogh and the Modern Movement, Exh. cat., Essen, 1990, p. 358). The vibrant colours and bold brushwork of the present work reveal the brilliant confidence with which Heckel was painting at this time. In this dashing self-confidence the work is closely related to another Dangaster Landschaft of 1909 (V1909/84), (see Fig. 1).
The present picture also shows a similarity of style between the Brücke artists and the Fauves. As Peter Vergo has commented on the closely related work Haus in Dangast, 1908, (V1908/8), now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, "it would not be difficult to convince oneself that, instead of the cold sunlight of Germany's North Sea coast, these were the brilliant colours of the Mediterranean captured by a painter such as Vlaminck or Derain" (P. Vergo, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection of Twentieth Century German Painting, London, 1992, p. 115). Indeed, Heckel would have been very aware of the paintings by Fauve artists, including Derain, van Dongen, Marquet and Vlaminck which had been exhibited in Dresden at the Galerie Emil Richter in September 1908.
We are grateful to Hans Geissler and Professor Paul Vogt for their help in cataloguing this work.
Dangast was a small fishing-village on the marshy lands of the Jadebusen inlet of the North Sea. Heckel spent several summers there with Schmidt-Rottluff, and according to Gustav Schiefler, the Hamburg lawyer who was amongst the Brücke's early and most supportive patrons, it was where he "discovered a feeling for the expansiveness of space and the corporeality of the sky; the sea and its atmosphere communicated both these to him ... Objects submitted to the totality of the surroundings to such a degree that space, air, and light appear as the actual carriers of the sensation" (G. Schiefler, 'Erich Heckels graphisches Werk', Das Kunstblatt, vol. II, no. 9, 1918, p. 286).
Dangaster Landschaft was painted during the most intense and inventive period of collaboration between Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff. It shows their development away from the influence of Neo-Impressionism and van Gogh, which had characterized much of Heckel's work up to 1908, to a much more spontaneous approach. The heavy impasto of his earlier works has given way to a flatter, clearer manner of painting. Furthermore, Anton Henze has noted how at this time Heckel started diluting his paints with varnish or even paraffin, experimenting with ground pigments and attempting to devise a kind of thin distemper that might suit his increasingly rapid and impulsive brushwork (A. Henze, Erich Heckel, Leben und Werk, Stuttgart/Zurich, 1983, pp. 26-7).
Professor Magdalena Moeller has described how Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff "had a sense of liberation when they were painting together, and they dashed works off...in an intoxication of creativity" (Van Gogh and the Modern Movement, Exh. cat., Essen, 1990, p. 358). The vibrant colours and bold brushwork of the present work reveal the brilliant confidence with which Heckel was painting at this time. In this dashing self-confidence the work is closely related to another Dangaster Landschaft of 1909 (V1909/84), (see Fig. 1).
The present picture also shows a similarity of style between the Brücke artists and the Fauves. As Peter Vergo has commented on the closely related work Haus in Dangast, 1908, (V1908/8), now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, "it would not be difficult to convince oneself that, instead of the cold sunlight of Germany's North Sea coast, these were the brilliant colours of the Mediterranean captured by a painter such as Vlaminck or Derain" (P. Vergo, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection of Twentieth Century German Painting, London, 1992, p. 115). Indeed, Heckel would have been very aware of the paintings by Fauve artists, including Derain, van Dongen, Marquet and Vlaminck which had been exhibited in Dresden at the Galerie Emil Richter in September 1908.
We are grateful to Hans Geissler and Professor Paul Vogt for their help in cataloguing this work.