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Lot Essay
‘Van Gogh was father to us all!’
(Hermann Max Pechstein)
With its dense field of thick brushstrokes, and vibrant play of discordant, luminous colours, Blühende Apfelbäume captures the intense fervour with which the young Erich Heckel approached painting during the formative years of his career. Dating from the spring of 1907, this extremely rare early work documents not only Heckel’s ambitious and highly experimental first forays into painting but also the early genesis of the style which would come to define the Die Brücke movement, of which Heckel was a founding member. Filled with bright, free-flowing strokes of pigment, Blühende Apfelbäume sees the artist transform a modest country cottage and its verdant gardens into a semi-abstract play of colour and expressive line, capturing the sheer vitality of the blossoming apple trees and the surrounding landscape in a spontaneous, vivid dance of colourful brushstrokes. The intense visual drama of the composition, along with the richness of its colour contrasts and animated brushwork, owe a clear debt to the late painterly style of Vincent van Gogh, whose passionate personal responses to the French landscape stood as a key touchstone for Heckel and his compatriots during this period.
For almost a decade after Van Gogh’s untimely death in the summer of 1890, the revolutionary artist’s work remained largely unknown in Germany. It was not until the first decade of the Twentieth Century that Van Gogh’s reputation as a pioneering artistic visionary truly took hold in the country, thanks in large part to the dedicated activities of several passionate collectors and supporters who sought to save the artist from obscurity. The influential gallerist Paul Cassirer, for example, staged no fewer than ten shows of Van Gogh’s work at his Berlin based gallery between 1901 and 1914. For the Die Brücke artists, it was the 1905 travelling exhibition of Van Gogh’s paintings which came to the Galerie Ernst Arnold in Dresden that proved to be a crucial catalyst for their experiments. Organised by Cassirer, the exhibition included over fifty works by the Dutch master, many dating from Van Gogh’s time in Arles and Auvers. Startlingly modern in their conception, these paintings left an indelible mark on the young artists, who marvelled at their emotive power and visceral application of paint. According to Fritz Schumacher, one of the teachers at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden under whose tutelage Heckel studied architecture, the Die Brücke artists ‘went wild’ when they saw original paintings by Van Gogh in person. While Heckel and most of his associates were likely familiar with Van Gogh’s work thanks to the extensive writings of the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, the experience of encountering the paintings first hand, of witnessing the unique intensity of Van Gogh’s vision directly, set the Die Brücke artists on a decidedly new path, one founded on the personal expression of an inner force or spirit, often sparked by their direct encounter with the natural world. Indeed, the artist’s influence was so great that Max Pechstein, who joined Die Brücke a year after its founding, later remarked, ‘Van Gogh was father to us all!’ (Pechstein, quoted in J. Lloyd, Vincent van Gogh and Expressionism, exh. cat., Ostfildern, 2006, p. 11).
Guided by Van Gogh’s example, Heckel and the Die Brücke artists pushed the boundaries of their painting into new realms of pure expression. Die Brücke had been born out of the friendship between Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl, and soon developed into one of the leading artistic collectives of the German avant-garde during the first decade of the Twentieth Century. Designed as a collective organisation, in which members were encouraged to work and exhibit together, Die Brücke sought to challenge the status quo of established art styles and develop a new, raw, unfiltered approach to painting that could authentically convey the artist’s own personal emotional response to the world. However, the route to achieving these goals remained somewhat uncertain for the Die Brücke artists. Indeed, recalling the moment in which the name of the group was decided upon, Heckel described their lack of clarity about how exactly they would break away from tradition: ‘One evening as we were walking home, we talked about it once more. Schmidt-Rottluff said we could call it ‘Brücke,’ that was a many-layered word, and didn’t imply a programme, but in a sense implied going from one bank to the other. It was clear which bank he wanted to leave, but it was less certain where we wanted to end up’ (Heckel, quoted in U. Lorenz, Brücke, Cologne, 2008, p. 8). The encounter with Van Gogh’s art would provide the Die Brücke artists with the initial spark of inspiration they needed to set them on their revolutionary path, opening their eyes to a new approach to painting, and encouraging them to infuse their own experiments with a freedom of expression that would prove groundbreaking.
While Heckel absorbed the central tenets of Van Gogh’s style, he interpreted them in a highly personal manner, marrying them with his own unique painterly vision to add a new sense of dynamism to his compositions. Particularly striking is the heightened colour palette and myriad of non-naturalistic hues he uses in the depiction of the landscape, as bright blues and vibrant oranges sit alongside deep purples and warm golds. Displaying a bold sense of bravura, the entire scene in Blühende Apfelbäume is constructed using raw strokes of pure colour, while the brushwork is almost sculptural in its application, the heavy strokes of pigment lending the painting a visual drama that builds on the example of Van Gogh, and pushes it to new extremes. Indeed, the artist’s brushstrokes appear to have been applied with a sense of abandon, their forms flickering across the surface of the canvas to build a dense weave of colour that seems to swirl and quiver before the viewer. Imbuing the painting with a sense of the energy and spontaneity with which Heckel has committed his vision to the canvas, this brushwork offers a decided contrast to the regular repetition of Van Gogh’s carefully applied strokes of pigment, combining the Dutch master’s preference for heavy impasto with elements of late Impressionist colour and facture to emphasise the painterliness of the surface, and generate a raw sense of energy.
(Hermann Max Pechstein)
With its dense field of thick brushstrokes, and vibrant play of discordant, luminous colours, Blühende Apfelbäume captures the intense fervour with which the young Erich Heckel approached painting during the formative years of his career. Dating from the spring of 1907, this extremely rare early work documents not only Heckel’s ambitious and highly experimental first forays into painting but also the early genesis of the style which would come to define the Die Brücke movement, of which Heckel was a founding member. Filled with bright, free-flowing strokes of pigment, Blühende Apfelbäume sees the artist transform a modest country cottage and its verdant gardens into a semi-abstract play of colour and expressive line, capturing the sheer vitality of the blossoming apple trees and the surrounding landscape in a spontaneous, vivid dance of colourful brushstrokes. The intense visual drama of the composition, along with the richness of its colour contrasts and animated brushwork, owe a clear debt to the late painterly style of Vincent van Gogh, whose passionate personal responses to the French landscape stood as a key touchstone for Heckel and his compatriots during this period.
For almost a decade after Van Gogh’s untimely death in the summer of 1890, the revolutionary artist’s work remained largely unknown in Germany. It was not until the first decade of the Twentieth Century that Van Gogh’s reputation as a pioneering artistic visionary truly took hold in the country, thanks in large part to the dedicated activities of several passionate collectors and supporters who sought to save the artist from obscurity. The influential gallerist Paul Cassirer, for example, staged no fewer than ten shows of Van Gogh’s work at his Berlin based gallery between 1901 and 1914. For the Die Brücke artists, it was the 1905 travelling exhibition of Van Gogh’s paintings which came to the Galerie Ernst Arnold in Dresden that proved to be a crucial catalyst for their experiments. Organised by Cassirer, the exhibition included over fifty works by the Dutch master, many dating from Van Gogh’s time in Arles and Auvers. Startlingly modern in their conception, these paintings left an indelible mark on the young artists, who marvelled at their emotive power and visceral application of paint. According to Fritz Schumacher, one of the teachers at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden under whose tutelage Heckel studied architecture, the Die Brücke artists ‘went wild’ when they saw original paintings by Van Gogh in person. While Heckel and most of his associates were likely familiar with Van Gogh’s work thanks to the extensive writings of the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, the experience of encountering the paintings first hand, of witnessing the unique intensity of Van Gogh’s vision directly, set the Die Brücke artists on a decidedly new path, one founded on the personal expression of an inner force or spirit, often sparked by their direct encounter with the natural world. Indeed, the artist’s influence was so great that Max Pechstein, who joined Die Brücke a year after its founding, later remarked, ‘Van Gogh was father to us all!’ (Pechstein, quoted in J. Lloyd, Vincent van Gogh and Expressionism, exh. cat., Ostfildern, 2006, p. 11).
Guided by Van Gogh’s example, Heckel and the Die Brücke artists pushed the boundaries of their painting into new realms of pure expression. Die Brücke had been born out of the friendship between Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl, and soon developed into one of the leading artistic collectives of the German avant-garde during the first decade of the Twentieth Century. Designed as a collective organisation, in which members were encouraged to work and exhibit together, Die Brücke sought to challenge the status quo of established art styles and develop a new, raw, unfiltered approach to painting that could authentically convey the artist’s own personal emotional response to the world. However, the route to achieving these goals remained somewhat uncertain for the Die Brücke artists. Indeed, recalling the moment in which the name of the group was decided upon, Heckel described their lack of clarity about how exactly they would break away from tradition: ‘One evening as we were walking home, we talked about it once more. Schmidt-Rottluff said we could call it ‘Brücke,’ that was a many-layered word, and didn’t imply a programme, but in a sense implied going from one bank to the other. It was clear which bank he wanted to leave, but it was less certain where we wanted to end up’ (Heckel, quoted in U. Lorenz, Brücke, Cologne, 2008, p. 8). The encounter with Van Gogh’s art would provide the Die Brücke artists with the initial spark of inspiration they needed to set them on their revolutionary path, opening their eyes to a new approach to painting, and encouraging them to infuse their own experiments with a freedom of expression that would prove groundbreaking.
While Heckel absorbed the central tenets of Van Gogh’s style, he interpreted them in a highly personal manner, marrying them with his own unique painterly vision to add a new sense of dynamism to his compositions. Particularly striking is the heightened colour palette and myriad of non-naturalistic hues he uses in the depiction of the landscape, as bright blues and vibrant oranges sit alongside deep purples and warm golds. Displaying a bold sense of bravura, the entire scene in Blühende Apfelbäume is constructed using raw strokes of pure colour, while the brushwork is almost sculptural in its application, the heavy strokes of pigment lending the painting a visual drama that builds on the example of Van Gogh, and pushes it to new extremes. Indeed, the artist’s brushstrokes appear to have been applied with a sense of abandon, their forms flickering across the surface of the canvas to build a dense weave of colour that seems to swirl and quiver before the viewer. Imbuing the painting with a sense of the energy and spontaneity with which Heckel has committed his vision to the canvas, this brushwork offers a decided contrast to the regular repetition of Van Gogh’s carefully applied strokes of pigment, combining the Dutch master’s preference for heavy impasto with elements of late Impressionist colour and facture to emphasise the painterliness of the surface, and generate a raw sense of energy.