Erich Heckel - Mohn - image-1
Erich Heckel - Mohn - image-2
Erich Heckel - Mohn - image-1Erich Heckel - Mohn - image-2

Lot 312 D

Erich Heckel - Mohn

Auction 1033 - overview Cologne
30.05.2014, 18:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 30.000 € - 35.000 €
Result: 39.040 € (incl. premium)

Erich Heckel

Mohn
1926

Watercolour on firm, slightly grained laid paper 55.8 x 44.3 cm Framed under glass. Signed, dated and titled 'ErichHeckel 26/ - Mohn -' in the composition lower left. - Left margin with a small, professionally closed tear. In fine condition.

The present watercolour is a very fine example of Heckel's still lifes from the 1920s. The table with patterned tablecloth, the poppy stems extending outwards from the simple and rustic stoneware pot and the broadly decorated background are motivic components assigned equal value alongside one another and chromatically corresponding with one another beyond the limits of the actual objects. The picture plane is thus optimally filled in and is nonetheless consciously structured. The artist has inserted the head of his 1913 wooden sculpture “Frau” (Woman; Vogt 11, see also comparative illus.) in the foreground. It was created in the town of Osterholz and is now located in the Brücke-Museum Berlin. The dynamic background is made up of ornaments from the painted walls of his studio.
“The early still lifes of the Dresden period of the 'Brücke' still tend to be oriented towards traditional iconography; in Berlin, however, with the new visual idiom of a fundamentally transformed style, Heckel begins to isolate still lifes from out of the context of the studio, and their combinations of motifs are recruited primarily from the inventory of the 'primitivist' decoration of the workspace. Thus, the sculptures and pieces of furniture, which they themselves had carved, as well as the collected exotica of the studios - which they had gathered on account of their enthusiasm for non-European cultures and which is well-known to have also exerted a formative stylistic influence on the work of the 'Brücke' artists - were arranged into still lifes, often in interaction with depictions of the exoticist painting of the studio walls in the background. Heckel's still-life painting reached a first climax in the 1920s, following his return from the First World War. Floral still lifes now entered the artist's oeuvre as a preferred motif that was often arranged together with sculptures or figural wall paintings into compositions of symbolic character; after the shock of the turmoil of war, these works give voice to the new need for order and stability through their new and clear structure as well as their marked two-dimensionality and the parallel placement of the depicted objects. The dominance of the floral motif continued into the late period of the Hemmenhofen years. These were joined by images which, in the form of 'Remembered Still Lifes', became a retrospective 'mirror image of his artistic development'” (Hanna Strzoda, Die Stilleben Erich Heckels, in: Erich Heckel, Aufbruch und Tradition, Eine Retrospektive, exhib. cat. Schleswig/Berlin, Munich 2010, pp. 98 f.).

Certificate

We would like to thank Hans Geissler and Renate Ebner, Erich Heckel Foundation Hemmenhofen, for their kind additional information. The work is registered at the archive of the Erich Heckel Estate.

Provenance

Private collection, North Rhine-Westphalia

Exhibitions

Münster 1953 (Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Münster), Erich Heckel - Zur Vollendung des siebenten Lebensjahrzehntes, cat. no. 132