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ERICH HECKEL or German Expressionism
A magnificent exhibition in Ghent (Belgium)
At the end of 2024, the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent (MSK) dedicated an exhibition to the German artist Erich Heckel (1883-1970). Heckel was one of the leading figures of German Expressionism and a co-founder of the artists' association Brücke.
From the end of the 19th century, young artists in Germany resisted the fleeting nature of Impressionism. In Dresden, the Brücke artists' association was founded in 1905. The 22-year-old Erich Heckel was one of the co-founders. This association of self-taught artists aimed to express strong joie de vivre in a common style of bright colors and angular forms. This style is called Expressionism: the artist tries to convey inner emotions through form and color rather than objective reality.
At the outbreak of World War I, Heckel was in his early thirties. Nevertheless, he already enjoyed a solid reputation in Germany. During the war, he became acquainted with Flanders. As a nurse for the Red Cross, he traveled to Ghent, Roeselare, and Ostend. On the hospital train, assembled by Walter Kaesbach, a curator of the Berlin National Gallery, were other painters and writers. As a result, the emergency hospital at Ostend station grew into a true artists' colony. Heckel met James Ensor there and developed a special friendship with his fellow nurse, the young poet Ernst Morwitz, whose literary world had a significant influence on his visual work.
During the war, Heckel's artistic activities continued. Between their shifting duties, the members of the artists' colony had enough time to devote to their art. In addition to several paintings, many gouaches, watercolors, drawings, and graphic works have been preserved: views of Roeselare, Ostend, and Ghent, sometimes featuring picturesque figures and bathers, but also still lifes, landscapes, and seascapes.
Despite the historical context, Heckel's stay in Flanders extended beyond World War I. Heckel was not a 'war artist' but a nurse working mainly behind the front lines. As a draftsman, he made numerous sketches of the places he visited and the people he observed. As a painter, he was particularly impressed by the Flemish landscape and the North Sea, with their unique cloud formations where light always tries to break through; motifs that seemed both foreign and familiar to him. The Flemish landscapes reminded him of the early days of the Brücke, when Heckel and his friends Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff would go out to paint en plein air.
(Source : MSK GHENT – BELGIUM)
Abstract Expressionism. Mixed media on French paper. Painting Copyright Thea LaVigna 2007 all rights reserved.
ENSOR AND THE MASKS
1935
James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949) was a Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for most of his life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX.
Ensor's father, James Frederic Ensor, born in Brussels to English parents, was a cultivated man who studied engineering in England and Germany. Ensor's mother, Maria Catherina Haegheman, was Belgian. Ensor himself lacked interest in academic study and left school at the age of fifteen to begin his artistic training with two local painters. From 1877 to 1880, he attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where one of his fellow students was Fernand Khnopff. Ensor first exhibited his work in 1881. From 1880 until 1917, he had his studio in the attic of his parents' house. His travels were very few: three brief trips to France and two to the Netherlands in the 1880s, and a four-day trip to London in 1892.
During the late 19th century, much of Ensor's work was rejected as scandalous, particularly his painting Christ's Entry Into Brussels in 1889 (1888–89). The Belgian art critic Octave Maus famously summed up the response from contemporaneous art critics to Ensor's innovative (and often scathingly political) work: "Ensor is the leader of a clan. Ensor is the limelight. Ensor sums up and concentrates certain principles which are considered to be anarchistic. In short, Ensor is a dangerous person who has great changes. ... He is consequently marked for blows. It is at him that all the harquebuses are aimed. It is on his head that are dumped the most aromatic containers of the so-called serious critics." Some of Ensor's contemporaneous work reveals his defiant response to this criticism. For example, the 1887 etching "Le Pisseur" depicts the artist urinating on a graffitied wall declaring (in the voice of an art critic) "Ensor est un fou" or "Ensor is a Madman."
Ensor's paintings continued to be exhibited and he gradually won acceptance and acclaim. In 1895 his painting The Lamp Boy (1880) was acquired by the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels, and he had his first solo exhibition in Brussels. By 1920 he was the subject of major exhibitions; in 1929 he was named a Baron by King Albert, and was the subject of the Belgian composer Flor Alpaerts's James Ensor Suite; and in 1933 he was awarded the band of the Légion d'honneur. Alfred H. Barr Jr., the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, after considering Ensor's 1887 painting Tribulations of Saint Anthony (now in MoMA's collection), declared Ensor the boldest painter working at that time.
Even in the first decade of the 20th century, however, Ensor's production of new works was diminishing, and he increasingly concentrated on music—although he had no musical training, he was a gifted improviser on the harmonium, and spent much time performing for visitors.Against the advice of friends, he remained in Ostend during World War II despite the risk of bombardment. In his old age, he was an honored figure among Belgians, and his daily walk made him a familiar sight in Ostend. He died there following a short illness, on 19 November 1949 at the age of 89.
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The cathedral is located in the Cathedral Hill neighbourhood of San Francisco, California. The present cathedral replaced one (1891-1962) of the same name. The cathedral was designed by local architects John Michael Lee, Paul A. Ryan and Angus McSweeney, collaborating renown architects Pier Luigi Nervi and Pietro Belluschi — at the time, the Dean of the School of Architecture at MIT.
Its saddle roof is composed of eight segments of hyperbolic paraboloids, in such a fashion that the bottom horizontal cross section of the roof is a square and the top cross section is a cross.
In 2017, Architecture Digest named it one of the 10 most beautiful churches in the United States.
This project was an opportunity for me to explore the processes associated with fashion and textiles. I started by listening to music and responding to the emotion and beats of the music through mark making. Then I took the mark making pages and developed a number of designs using textile techniques, collage and the heat press. Then I used my paper and fabric to design something on the dress stand. This was my final garment design.
An A1 Commission piece of a lion which was captured at my visit to a zoo in Amsterdam. Oil Pastel piece.