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Lot Essay
Painted in the summer of 1911 during the artist's first visit to the village of Prerow on the Baltic coast, Landschaft bei Prerow is a rare and important double-sided canvas dating from the height of Erich Heckel’s involvement with Die Brücke.
Depicting a radiant sunlit scene on the banks of the Prerow Strom, the picture is a swirling and swiftly-executed depiction of the coastal landscape between the town and the beach. Rich, vibrant and full of impulsive, windswept energy, the picture was painted directly from nature onto a bare canvas using broad rapid strokes of pure colour applied straight from the tube and in accordance with the Brücke artists’ belief in harnessing the raw, emotive and gestural power of an immediate and spontaneous response to their subject matter and surroundings.
At the Moritzburg lakes in 1910, and again in 1911, immediately following his visit to Prerow, Heckel perfected the technique of painting in this impulsive and immediate manner, developing a masterful ability to capture and convey his own emotional response to the landscape in the pictures he produced. During this period, Heckel said, he and his fellow Brücke members were ‘just working for the sake of working. That the optical result was also powerful was not necessarily our intention, it was something that came out of the laws governing the way in which we were working. With regards to the external conditions - landscape, people, fluidity - all this stimulated the eye for colour and contributed to a pictorial vision that ran counter to that of the Impressionists and concentrated on the essential elements of picture-making - things more important than just the motif, the viewpoint or the momentary conditions’ (Heckel 1966, quoted in exh. cat., Die Badenden Mensch und Natur im deutschen Expressionismus, 2000, p. 36).
The verso of Landschaft bei Prerow contains another impressive painting from around the same period depicting a young girl and a naked woman in a blue hat in a landscape. Titled in the catalogue raisonné of Heckel’s work Kind und nackte Frau (verworfen), this painting was, at one time, crossed out. Its subject matter and style suggest that it derives from the visits to the Moritzburg lakes near Dresden that the Brücke group made in the summers of 1910 and 1911. It was in Moritzburg during these two summers that Heckel, Kirchner and Pechstein originated their group style and where some of their greatest paintings were made.
Depicting a radiant sunlit scene on the banks of the Prerow Strom, the picture is a swirling and swiftly-executed depiction of the coastal landscape between the town and the beach. Rich, vibrant and full of impulsive, windswept energy, the picture was painted directly from nature onto a bare canvas using broad rapid strokes of pure colour applied straight from the tube and in accordance with the Brücke artists’ belief in harnessing the raw, emotive and gestural power of an immediate and spontaneous response to their subject matter and surroundings.
At the Moritzburg lakes in 1910, and again in 1911, immediately following his visit to Prerow, Heckel perfected the technique of painting in this impulsive and immediate manner, developing a masterful ability to capture and convey his own emotional response to the landscape in the pictures he produced. During this period, Heckel said, he and his fellow Brücke members were ‘just working for the sake of working. That the optical result was also powerful was not necessarily our intention, it was something that came out of the laws governing the way in which we were working. With regards to the external conditions - landscape, people, fluidity - all this stimulated the eye for colour and contributed to a pictorial vision that ran counter to that of the Impressionists and concentrated on the essential elements of picture-making - things more important than just the motif, the viewpoint or the momentary conditions’ (Heckel 1966, quoted in exh. cat., Die Badenden Mensch und Natur im deutschen Expressionismus, 2000, p. 36).
The verso of Landschaft bei Prerow contains another impressive painting from around the same period depicting a young girl and a naked woman in a blue hat in a landscape. Titled in the catalogue raisonné of Heckel’s work Kind und nackte Frau (verworfen), this painting was, at one time, crossed out. Its subject matter and style suggest that it derives from the visits to the Moritzburg lakes near Dresden that the Brücke group made in the summers of 1910 and 1911. It was in Moritzburg during these two summers that Heckel, Kirchner and Pechstein originated their group style and where some of their greatest paintings were made.