In 1911, artist Erich Heckel painted this work in Dresden’s Friedrichstadt district, hardly three kilometres from here. There, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, his friend and fellow artist, had rented an empty shoemaker’s shop. The room was equipped with a large folding screen in bright green, which the artists painted with a border and a squatting female figure in dark blue. On the wall, they hung a yellow curtain which they decorated with green medallions. Whenever they had time free, the artists met here to draw and paint. They often paid young working-class girls to join them and model nude for their life drawings. At that time, these artists did not worry about many of their models being under-age – a concern we view very differently today. For them, the youth of their models was a guarantee of natural, unconstrained motifs.
Along with Heckel and Kirchner, this circle of friends also included Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. In summer 1905, six years before this work was painted, Schmidt-Rottluff had the idea of calling their artists’ group Die Brücke. The name Brücke – meaning ‘bridge’ – was intended to express the group’s collaborative approach as well as their joint artistic departure to new worlds.
And in fact, the Brücke artists did break fresh ground. The middle-class world of late imperial German was shocked by their powerful colours, applied unmixed and juxtaposed as flat surfaces, the renunciation of linear perspective, and not least the free-spirited, explicit subjects. Only later did mainstream society realise just how much this so-called ‘anti-art’ was motivated by a profound love of painting and executed with exceptional artistic skill. This work, for example, shows Heckel’s mastery only too clearly in how he captures, in just a few swift lines, such a lively snapshot of Franziska Fehrmann, nicknamed Fränzi, as she peers around the screen.
Further Media
The BRÜCKE in Dresden’s ethnological museum
The Brücke artists were very enthusiast about what they considered the “unspoilt” and “natural”. That enthusiasm not only evident their works, but also in how they decorated their studios – an idiosyncratic mix of pictures, painted curtains and furniture they had carved or made themselves. They modelled their designs on the art of African regions or the Pacific islands and, in the broadest sense, appropriated those aesthetics as well.
They took their inspiration from, for instance, the exhibits in Dresden’s Ethnological Museum. Above all, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner could often be found there with his sketch book and pencil. Through his drawings, he explored the essence of these works, and their formal idioms, for him so novel and unfamiliar. The Brücke artists regarded these artefacts as testifying to – in their terms – a natural, “authentic” art, the quintessential opposite of traditional European art allegedly “corrupted” by civilisation. Evidently, they did not ask HOW these objects entered the museum’s collection. In fact, anthropological museums often obtained many of their exhibits through the brutal exploitation of colonial rule.
The Brücke artists found another source of inspiration in what were called “ethnological expositions”. On average, such “human zoos” were presented twice a year in Dresden. On an open space in the Zoological Gardens, these popular and profitable “expositions” displayed people from Africa, Asia, Oceania or North America in replica dwellings, sometimes even in entire villages. In front of the crowds, they had to act out rituals and customs, perform dances, or demonstrate craft techniques. Soon after Kirchner and Heckel saw the “Samoa exposition” in 1910, they were producing prints of Samoan people – but have left no record of what they otherwise thought of this spectacle. Undoubtedly, the “human zoos” confirmed the prejudices and clichés of colonialism. The staged shows asserted the Otherness of these cultures, allegedly living “close to nature”, and further strengthened the idea of Europe’s purported superiority.
- Material & Technique
- Front: oil on canvas, back: tempera on canvas
- Museum
- Galerie Neue Meister
- Dating
- undated
- Inventory number
- Inv.-Nr. 2016/07