HECKEL 2023.192

German Expressionist portraits frequently portrayed anxious, brooding or melancholic women, imagining troubled inner psyches in powerful and closely cropped images that convey a sense of claustrophobia. Here, a reclining female figure appears to solicit the viewer’s gaze, her expression solemn, her features fatigued and hollow. Combined with her elongated limbs, the image suggests both vulnerability and psychological tension. Created on the eve of World War One, the woodcut ominously foreshadows the suffering, destitution and grief of the coming years.  

A founding member of artist group Die Brücke (The Bridge), Erich Heckel sought to strip representation back to its essentials, using the woodblock’s resistance to the artist’s hand as an expressive force in itself. The rough-hewn lines and uneven pressure of the ink distribution foreground the physicality of printmaking; the artist’s direct engagement with the medium is underscored by a belief in art as a vital, almost primal act, capable of conveying the anxieties of a rapidly changing world.