FROM THE YEARS OF THE EARLY TRIUMPHS
Symphony in Green + Blue
from the Group of “Houses in the Park”
Franz Heckendorf (Berlin 1888 – Munich 1962). House in the Park with Couple. Two-storied villa with attic in the saddleback situated picturesquely in the warm sun behind staffage of trees and bushes with ramified paths. Left-sided steps leading to the house’s entrance with a wintergarden set before. Coming in the direction of the viewer a couple. Oil on canvas. 1921. Inscribed lower right:
60 x 70.5 cm. Framed.
Literature
Kestner-Museum Hannover, (Catalogues of the Special Exhibitions) XVII, 1918; Joachim Kirchner, Franz Heckendorf, 1919 + 1924; Franz Heckendorf, catalogue of the special exhibition of the Galerie Hagemeier, Frankfort/Main, 1985; (Symphony in Color, Exhibition Catalog of) Kunstfreunde Bergstraße, 1991; Thieme-Becker XVI (1923), 211 f.; Vollmer II (1955), 400; Cicerone, vols. 1912-1928, here especially XVI (1924), 802 f. (not reviewed); Feuer II, 1 (1920/21), 195-202.
Heckendorfshining main work
in dominating deep green before an equally blue sky with the roof of the house kept in Terra di Siena whose light ochre front side corresponds with the meandering path. From the group of Houses in the Park proven here for the years 1919-1928, close to, besides others, E. L. Kirchner’s chronologically previous paintings “House below Trees / Fehmarn” of 1912 (figured in Berlin in 1917 in the exhibition of the Free Secession), “Staberhof Farm / Fehmarn” of 1913, “Villas in Königstein / Taunus”, 1915/16, or “Mountain Wood with Cabins” (pen + brush about 1918). Applicable also the woodcut “Weather Firs” (1919) with its heavy green-blue and the ochre coloured paths with their small figures typical for Kirchner and expressionism otherwise, too, just as the couple here with Heckendorf, whose intense colours here also determine i. a. “Holy Family on the Flight” of the same year.
Heckendorf’s own Villa-Park complex
proven here
with his sunny painting “House in the Park” (100 x 80) of 1919 whose line of slender trees flanking the path to the house interrupted by four steps we meet again in 1928; the pastel “House in the Park” of 1922 (66 x 47); the summerly “Villa in the Park” of 1925 (water colour + tempera, 29.5 x 28.5 cm), again with tight leafy trees as foreground and the façade in light ochre, and, without house, his water colour “Trees” (41 x 31 cm) of 1928 with the ochre coloured path lined by the already mentioned slender trees and whose play of lights and shades quotes the one of the painting of 1921 here though reminds in its formality altogether as impressionistic reminiscence of pictures by Manet, e.g. his “Landscape in Rueil” of 1882 in the Munich exhibition of 1997 “Manet bis van Gogh – Hugo von Tschudi und der Kampf um die Moderne” (no. 21 + pp. 84 f. of the catalogue). – Besides all independence it seems possible that Heckendorf varied the same object in each case. If finally the painting here or the pastel of 1922 are identical with the house-park-work documented in “Cicerone” 1924 (pp. 802 f.) or this enriches the complex by a further one cannot be decided here at the moment. So the one here appears as
the most beautiful + accomplished
of this intimate-quiet group of works ,
exemplary beyond Heckendorf for the landscape in the painting of expressionism in general. Jawlensky’s programmatic “to translate nature into colors correspondingly to my glowing soul” stands unspokenly also above the Heckendorf here. For
“ The most mature Heckendorf has worked till now
are his landscapes ” .
In which figures, so arising, are subordinated consciously-visibly by (non)faces devoid of contours as widely typical for him and as here, too. For
“ ‘to spiritualize everything that is optically visible and translate it into the sphere of the visionarily seen’; that meant
the accomplishment of the program of modern expressionism
of which H. is one of the most persuasive evangelists … ”
(Vollmer 1923 in Thieme-Becker).
Generations later Peter Bürger shall speak
with reference to Kirchner’s street figures
of “ lineaments simplified like masks ”
as expression of “ a general irrelativeness ”
(Saunters overstretch the Town … Kirchner and the Mannerism in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of July 23, 2001). But already Hogarth made use of this stylistic method of in the end Biblical origin by way of “Times I” (1762) in the person of Lord Temple, that is not to make a picture, just as likewise the children of orthodox Mennonites play with faceless puppets.
“ Pupil of the instruction class of the Berlin Museum of Applied Arts and the Acad., but essentially autodidact (as the contemporaries Heckel + E. L. Kirchner, too, and like these starting from impressionism). One of the most talented exponents of the young generation of German artists, whose personal style found its most mature expression till now in his landscapes filled
by an enormous dynamic of pictorial execution
and carried by a strong inwardness of perception. Already as a 20-year-old he exhibited (1909) 2 Street Scenes in the Berlin Secession which were still influenced by the impression of the impressionist way to paint …
Decidedly talented for the decorative subject ”
(Vollmer continuing ibid.).
And also in contemporary time Horst Ludwig in Catalogue Hagemeier in view of a 1958 “Southern Landscape with Sailing-Boats” discourses on the “tendency of overheightened nature” :
“ Here also (just as it was) the claim to describe purely and barely what urged the artist to his work as already raised in the program of the ‘Bridge Artists’ in 1906 becomes recognizable: the own vision that first linked itself to the landscape though not following it purely imitatively.
With (once more just as it was) passionate brushstrokes that remain visible as such and are used artistically, with pasty colour application so that a vivid surface of the painting appears the southern painting is visualized … The colours themselves are also set harshly against each other, almost purely toned they are applied with a comparatively thick brush and remain linked with the trace of it so that the composition clearly consists of these stroke positions. ”
And quoting Joachim Kirchner on the line
“ ‘The line as the nerve of the composition, as the very own writing of the will carried by a powerful spirituality might be rated as the most singular of Heckendorf’s expressionism. As brutal and harsh the language of his lineation often seems to be, so always it is full of soul, its strong impulse reveals the inner tension, the restrained excitement by which the artist works at the intellectual penetration of the object. As sustainer of the whole rhythm of the picture is finally gets an important function in the structure of the complete image.’
Overlooking Heckendorf’s creation from several decades the vehemence by which he developed his own pictorial language, emanating from the art of the turn of the century and … kept is astonishing. For Heckendorf the object always remained priority though formally heightened and coloristically alienated. ”
And once more Vollmer in Thieme-Becker :
“ Mastering all techniques and a profoundly lightly producing talent . ”
Here then
FROM THE YEARS OF THOSE EARLY TRIUMPHS
a
Symphony in Green + Blue
as the most beautiful
from the group of the “ Houses in the Park ” at present .
Offer no. 28,823 / price on application
