Erich Heckel - Kleine Berglandschaft - image-1

Lot 333 Dα

Erich Heckel - Kleine Berglandschaft

Auction 1070 - overview Cologne
03.06.2016, 18:00 - Modern Art
Estimate: 40.000 € - 50.000 €

Erich Heckel

Kleine Berglandschaft
1962

Tempera on canvas 70.5 x 64.3 cm Framed. Signed and dated 'Heckel 62' in brown lower right. Verso also signed and dated on canvas as well as additionally signed and titled 'Heckel: Kleine Berglandschaft' in brown brush on the stretcher.

Panoramas of mountain chains and alpine rock formations form a repeatedly recurring subject among Erich Heckel's landscapes. He had already discovered this subject for his art in the course of his travels of the 1920s and 1930s. From a great distance, the artist guides the gaze of his viewers through the landscape and presents them with the essence of the nature directly experienced by the painter. Seen reality provides the foundation of Heckel's art - the moment of seeing, with its impact not only upon the eye and the intellect, but also on the emotions.
The dialogue with the motifs of the alpine world makes its mark most prominently in Heckel's late work, and here it finds what is perhaps its most complex form. Compared with his earlier mountain landscapes, Heckel has based the present work on a compact, almost austere composition. The clearly structured arrangement of the image, the strong simplification of the forms and the delicate palette conjure up a masterful network of lines and shapes, which is simultaneously extremely vibrant. Heckel expertly succeeds in interconnecting the individual pictorial elements, causing smaller and larger shapes to merge into one another. The artist contrasts the yellowish-green meadows and the rock formations built up in shades of grey with the delicate blue of the alpine lake and the luminously blue mountain formations in the painting's background. The uniformly cool tonality emphasises the individual forms and their relationship with one another. Heckel skilfully breaks up the extremely cohesive composition of rhythmically flowing, dynamic surfaces and relativises the massive quality of the mountain landscape through his soft, amorphous application of line.
Like a mirror of his own retreat from the restlessness of everyday life, Heckel's final landscapes detach themselves from their concrete contexts in time and space and grant us an almost private view of the late, arrived Heckel (cf. Christine Remm, Meditationen zu Struktur, Fläche und Ornament - Zu den späten Naturbildern, in: exhib. cat. Erich Heckel, Schleswig/Berlin 2010/11, pp. 159 f.).

Catalogue Raisonné

Vogt 1962/1

Certificate

We would like to thank Hans Geissler and Renate Ebner, Nachlass Erich Heckel - Erich Heckel Stiftung, Hemmenhofen, for complementary information. The painting is registered in the archive.

Provenance

Acquired directly from the artist by the former owner (1971); Private possession since, South Germany