Erich Heckel
Die Brucke founder, and one of the great woodcutters of German Expressionism.
Erich Heckel was born in Saxony in 1883 and was one of the four architecture students who founded Die Brucke in Dresden in 1905 with Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff and Bleyl. He found the group its first premises, kept its accounts, and made some of the sharpest woodcuts of the movement — angular, splintered, cut with the grain left showing. He served as a medical orderly in Flanders during the First World War, where he met Beckmann and Ensor. The Nazis declared his work degenerate, confiscated more than seven hundred pieces and banned him from exhibiting; his Berlin studio and many of his blocks were destroyed in 1944. He died in 1970.
The woodcuts and lithographs of the Brucke years are the heart of the market and are catalogued by Dube; state, paper, hand-colouring and whether an impression is from the small original printing rather than a later edition are decisive. Heckel reprinted from surviving blocks after the war and those impressions are valued quite differently. Paintings from before 1920 are scarce because so many were confiscated or destroyed, and provenance between 1933 and 1945 must be examined as a matter of course.
If you own a work by Erich Heckel
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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