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Lot Essay
Created in the months immediately following the founding of the Die Brücke movement, Hafenbahn im Winter encapsulates the visceral energy and highly experimental nature of Erich Heckel’s earliest painterly works. Heckel had first met the other founding members of the Die Brücke group – Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl – during the course of his architectural studies at the Technische Hochschule in Dresden. While his classes at the college had included instruction in drawing, the young artist had little formal experience in painting, and his earliest forays in the medium were thus a combination of a number of different influences. From the broken brushwork of the Impressionists, to the expressive, gestural strokes of Van Gogh, and the strident, non-naturalistic colours of Gauguin, Heckel looked to his artistic predecessors for inspiration, combining elements from each to create a unique, highly personal style of painting.
Depicting a lone figure walking along the tracks of a small harbour railway during the cold German winter, Hafenbahn im Winter explores a recurrent motif within the artist’s oeuvre – the structural forms and engineering system of the railway, a subject which had fascinated him since childhood. However, rather than diligently rendering the harbour and its unique transport lines in all their detail, Heckel allows the scene to become a showcase for his free, expressive brushwork. Bathed in the cool golden light of the winter sun, the harbour and its railway appear to dissolve before the viewer into an almost abstract play of independent, colourful brushstrokes, their gently curving, overlapping forms creating a lively surface of thickly impastoed paint. Form is created primarily by means of colour, the pigment piled in heavy masses to delineate the outline of the man’s body, the curve of the railway lines, the sturdy structure of the harbour wall that lines the edge of the route, while the sky becomes a tumultuous mass of shimmering, twisting curls of paint, in varying shades of green, pink and blue.
Depicting a lone figure walking along the tracks of a small harbour railway during the cold German winter, Hafenbahn im Winter explores a recurrent motif within the artist’s oeuvre – the structural forms and engineering system of the railway, a subject which had fascinated him since childhood. However, rather than diligently rendering the harbour and its unique transport lines in all their detail, Heckel allows the scene to become a showcase for his free, expressive brushwork. Bathed in the cool golden light of the winter sun, the harbour and its railway appear to dissolve before the viewer into an almost abstract play of independent, colourful brushstrokes, their gently curving, overlapping forms creating a lively surface of thickly impastoed paint. Form is created primarily by means of colour, the pigment piled in heavy masses to delineate the outline of the man’s body, the curve of the railway lines, the sturdy structure of the harbour wall that lines the edge of the route, while the sky becomes a tumultuous mass of shimmering, twisting curls of paint, in varying shades of green, pink and blue.