Liegende (Reclining figure), Erich Heckel

Archive Label 2003 (version 1): When the German expressionists, such as Erich Heckel, turned to woodcut they were fully aware of the tradition of German woodcut that rested in large part on the achievements of Dürer. One of the expressionists, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, claimed this distinction for himself when he wrote, “From Southern Germany Kirchner brought the woodcut, which he had revived under inspiration of the old prints in Nuremberg…” Archive Label 2003 (version 2): Erich Heckel was one of the four founding members of Die Brücke in 1905, and was central to the development of German Expressionism. Prints, especially woodcuts, were crucial to the group’s ideals of simplifying forms and developing flat, planar imagery. The group worked together, producing works such as Liegende, until the World War I overtook them. Heckel volunteered for military service, and served in the same medical corps as Max Beckmann. Following the war, he became director of the Angermuseum in Erfurt, Germany. The Nazi government declared Heckel’s work un-German and unfit to be seen in public. In 1941, Heckel left Berlin to reside in Carinthia, the southern-most state of Austria, until the war ended. When he returned to Berlin in 1944, he found that his studio and the works left inside were completely destroyed, so he moved to Lake Constance, bordering southern Germany and northern Switzerland. He taught at a nearby art academy until retiring in 1955, and painted mainly landscapes until his death in 1970. Archive Label date unknown: Yamamoto Kanae's Fisherman is cited as the first example of sōsaku hanga because Kanae carved the blocks and printed the picture himself. He used a technique of carving based on Western-style wood-engraving, at which he made his living. With this technique, Kanae produced a deliberately crude image in which the cutting marks in the wood are visible in the print. This departed from the highly refined technique of ukiyo-e and shin hanga, and was closer in spirit to the style of modern German woodcuts, which strongly influenced Japanese artists in the early twentieth century. The harsh colors and abrupt, angular lines of Die Brücke prints, such as this one by Erich Heckel, seemed the height of Western modernism to the Japanese. No copy of the original Fisherman is known to exist. This is one of ten reprints from the original block.