Erich Heckel

Erich Heckel (1883-1970), German painter, printmaker, and sculptor, whose work was central to the development of expressionism. Artists in the expressionist movement used exaggerated color and distorted line to express emotion. Heckel was a founder and an influential member of the Dresden-based group of expressionists called Die Brücke (The Bridge).

Heckel was born in Döbeln, near Dresden. In 1904 he began studying architecture at Dresden's Technische Hochschule (technical college), where he met artists Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Fritz Bleyl. In 1905 Heckel, Kirchner, Bleyl, and Heckel’s childhood friend Karl Schmidt-Rottluff founded Die Brücke. Serving as manager for the group, Heckel organized exhibitions, mediated disputes, and built decorative furniture for their shared studio. As did the other Brücke artists, Heckel painted nudes in interiors and in icy lakeside landscapes. The group also specialized in woodcut prints, reviving the German tradition of woodcuts. Heckel’s woodcuts were particularly influential and were admired for their combination of strong planes and expressive lines. He viewed them as a financial mainstay for the group and printed them in large numbers. He also created special editions for invitations and posters advertising the artists’ group shows.

Heckel followed Kirchner to Berlin in 1911, and there his style evolved to include the fractured planes of cubism. His work also showed the influence of masks and other artifacts from Polynesia that he saw in Berlin’s ethnographic museum. His compositions became more complex, with dynamic lines and interlocking facets, even as his colors became more muted and melancholy. During World War I (1914-1918) Heckel served as a medical orderly. The woodcut self-portraits that he produced during the war display an increasing sense of anxiety and tension, a note absent in his later, calmer work.

Heckel returned to Berlin after the war but also traveled extensively in Germany, Italy, and France. In 1937 the German Nazi government designated him among a large group of what they termed 'degenerate' artists, and denied him public work and exhibition. He went into exile in Austria in 1941, but returned in 1944 to the village of Hemmenhofen, by Bodensee (Lake of Constance), where fellow artist Otto Dix also lived. From 1949 to 1955 Heckel taught at an art academy in Karlsruhe.