Art: Shadow of the Bridge

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 he no longer fully understands.

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; and while two sketched, a third would recite Nietzsche or Rilke.

A Better Anger. In 1905 they founded an artistic brotherhood that they called die Brilcke (the Bridge) because they regarded it as a link between 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, 1905 to 1922.

Some of the works display the influence of African and Asian art, and some seem to combine the thick, blunt lines of Gothic woodcuts with the vi brant tendrils of art nouveau. Com pared to the primitive force of some expressionists, Heckel’s forms have been described as “lyrical and refined.” But taken alone, their chief characteristic is a searing fury—a world of distorted faces and figures as throbbing as Van Gogh’s and as pain-racked as Munch’s.

A medic in World War I, Heckel kept his sketchbook close to him, recorded in blistering strokes the wounded and the insane, the sight of bombed-out villages and bands of homeless orphans. As the gallery’s Erwin Petermann, the arranger of the show, says: “Heckel is still as provocative as anything an angry young man of today will concoct, with the difference that instead of showing one’s disdain in burlap and trash, or manifesting one’s revulsion in painted soup-can labels, his work shows the roughness of life in realistic exclamation marks.”

The founders of the Bridge were largely self-taught and at first they tended to paint rather alike. They all did carmine-red houses, crimson trees, ultramarine roads, faces that were part chrome yellow and part cobalt blue. They had no liking for the impressionists, who saw a pear in a bowl as having many different shades of green. “For us,” says Heckel, “it was a green pear—bang—in a red bowl.” They also scorned impressionist garden paintings that “could just as well have been shifted a few yards to the right or left in the choice of the scene to be shown.” The Germans were after a complete and total effect, using colors to build emotion. It was, says Heckel, “a sort of rush to seize the instant,” with all the life of that instant bursting beneath the surface.

Still at Work. When the Bridge broke up, the original artists developed their own strong individual styles, but all were lumped together as “decadents” by the Nazis. Heckel may have suffered the most: more than 700 of his pictures were yanked from museums, many of them to be burned or hacked to pieces, and when an Allied bomb destroyed his house, it destroyed a large part of what remained of his life’s work.

But these blows did not destroy Heckel. A spry, kindly eyed old man, he still paints, turning out about ten canvases a year that are light and lyrical and full of pleasing harmonies. “What intrigues me is the secret of color relations. The excitement of this has never ceased, and perhaps that is what keeps me going,” he says. And: “Nature has provided for youth to scale heights and break walls. It is for the old to exploit what has been gained.”