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Lot Essay
Dangaster Landschaft (Dangast Landscape) was painted by Heckel during his second visit to the town of Dangast on the North Sea coast of Germany in the summer of 1908. A striking, free-flowing painting executed in brilliant colour, it is an important work that documents the genesis of the Brücke style and Heckel's as one of the foremost artists of his generation.
Until 1907, Heckel had worked exclusively on card or board, and had begun to work on canvas only a year before he executed the present work. At this time his painting had tentatively evolved from a period strongly influenced by Neo-Impressionism into a looser style characterised by the division of bold strokes of pure colour that begin to assert their independence from the objects they represent. It was only in the summer of 1908 while away in Dangast that Heckel evolved the raw and spontaneous Expressionist style that would dominate his art and that of the rest of the Die Brücke group for the next two years.
Displaying an astonishing bravura and assuredness in the way in which the pastoral scene has been constructed from raw strokes of pure colour squeezed straight from the tube, Dangaster Landschaft clearly reflects the artist's enjoyment of his new-found mastery over the medium. Heckel had seen an exhibition of a hundred paintings by Van Gogh in the spring of 1908 and it had confirmed for him that his art was evolving along the right lines. Inspired by the confidence this exhibition had given him, his painting exploded during his summer visit to Dangast into a riot of free-form colour.
This was Heckel's second visit to Dangast and on this occasion he spent a good deal of time in the company of his childhood friend and fellow Die Brücke member, Karl Schmidt Rotluff who had decided to join Heckel's working holiday in Dangast. Painting out of doors and directly from Nature, as the Brücke group was later to do around the lakes of Moritzburg, the open-air experience freed Heckel's art to the point where he was able to paint entirely intuitively from the scene around him.
This experience evidently encouraged Heckel to experiment and, trying out a number of new thinning agents, including petroleum, he began to create canvases where the colour and magnitude of his brush strokes stand independent of one another, conveying a physical sense of themselves as much as of the scene they represent. Heckel's brushstrokes were not supposed to be blended by the eye of the viewer into a composite unity, such as those of the Neo-Impressionists, but were allowed to remain as they are, areas of colour expressing the intuitive and emotive response of the artist to his surroundings. To this end in his Dangast landscapes, Heckel's colours grow increasingly divorced from the objects to which they belong in a way that emphasises the creative nature and the process of painting and conveys a sense of the emotional inner life of the artist.
In Dangaster Landschaft each brush stroke is allowed to have a life of its own and Heckel has often left the areas of canvas between each brushstroke bare. This generates a raw sense of energy to the work that stresses the painterliness of the surface. Heckel's abandoning of the traditional use of aerial perspective in his landscape paintings at this time also increases this strong sense of surface and immediacy in the work. By not mixing his colours and applying them directly from the tube to the canvas, Heckel has ensured that every area of the canvas from the background to the foreground has the same tonal intensity. In Dangaster Landschaft he has achieved a sense of distance by throwing the treeline and the house at the top of the picture into a cool deep blue shadow that both contrasts with and balances the warm reds and oranges of the foreground.
These swirling lines on the surface create a rhythmic energy that is reinforced and given an almost luminescent shimmering quality by the bare areas of the canvas underneath. This raw technique combining rapidly applied, pure colour with unpainted areas of bare canvas would become the standard for all of the Die Brücke group's collective outdoor work over the next few years and is the closest the group ever came to establishing a united style. More importantly, here Heckel has used this new technique as a means of generating a vitality and sense of immediacy in the painting - an immediacy that in turn conveys the blustery transient nature of the living landscape. This bold technique can be seen in Heckel's Marschland (Dangast) of 1907 now in the Brücke-Museum, Berlin.
Until 1907, Heckel had worked exclusively on card or board, and had begun to work on canvas only a year before he executed the present work. At this time his painting had tentatively evolved from a period strongly influenced by Neo-Impressionism into a looser style characterised by the division of bold strokes of pure colour that begin to assert their independence from the objects they represent. It was only in the summer of 1908 while away in Dangast that Heckel evolved the raw and spontaneous Expressionist style that would dominate his art and that of the rest of the Die Brücke group for the next two years.
Displaying an astonishing bravura and assuredness in the way in which the pastoral scene has been constructed from raw strokes of pure colour squeezed straight from the tube, Dangaster Landschaft clearly reflects the artist's enjoyment of his new-found mastery over the medium. Heckel had seen an exhibition of a hundred paintings by Van Gogh in the spring of 1908 and it had confirmed for him that his art was evolving along the right lines. Inspired by the confidence this exhibition had given him, his painting exploded during his summer visit to Dangast into a riot of free-form colour.
This was Heckel's second visit to Dangast and on this occasion he spent a good deal of time in the company of his childhood friend and fellow Die Brücke member, Karl Schmidt Rotluff who had decided to join Heckel's working holiday in Dangast. Painting out of doors and directly from Nature, as the Brücke group was later to do around the lakes of Moritzburg, the open-air experience freed Heckel's art to the point where he was able to paint entirely intuitively from the scene around him.
This experience evidently encouraged Heckel to experiment and, trying out a number of new thinning agents, including petroleum, he began to create canvases where the colour and magnitude of his brush strokes stand independent of one another, conveying a physical sense of themselves as much as of the scene they represent. Heckel's brushstrokes were not supposed to be blended by the eye of the viewer into a composite unity, such as those of the Neo-Impressionists, but were allowed to remain as they are, areas of colour expressing the intuitive and emotive response of the artist to his surroundings. To this end in his Dangast landscapes, Heckel's colours grow increasingly divorced from the objects to which they belong in a way that emphasises the creative nature and the process of painting and conveys a sense of the emotional inner life of the artist.
In Dangaster Landschaft each brush stroke is allowed to have a life of its own and Heckel has often left the areas of canvas between each brushstroke bare. This generates a raw sense of energy to the work that stresses the painterliness of the surface. Heckel's abandoning of the traditional use of aerial perspective in his landscape paintings at this time also increases this strong sense of surface and immediacy in the work. By not mixing his colours and applying them directly from the tube to the canvas, Heckel has ensured that every area of the canvas from the background to the foreground has the same tonal intensity. In Dangaster Landschaft he has achieved a sense of distance by throwing the treeline and the house at the top of the picture into a cool deep blue shadow that both contrasts with and balances the warm reds and oranges of the foreground.
These swirling lines on the surface create a rhythmic energy that is reinforced and given an almost luminescent shimmering quality by the bare areas of the canvas underneath. This raw technique combining rapidly applied, pure colour with unpainted areas of bare canvas would become the standard for all of the Die Brücke group's collective outdoor work over the next few years and is the closest the group ever came to establishing a united style. More importantly, here Heckel has used this new technique as a means of generating a vitality and sense of immediacy in the painting - an immediacy that in turn conveys the blustery transient nature of the living landscape. This bold technique can be seen in Heckel's Marschland (Dangast) of 1907 now in the Brücke-Museum, Berlin.