Erich Heckel Lot n° 517

"Yellow Still Life." Tempera on canvas. 1918. approx. 71 x 51 cm. Monogrammed and dated lower right. Signed and dated on the verso of the canvas and titled on the stretcher. Verso on the stretcher handwritten inscribed "Reuss" as well as with the number "C 6902" and a typographic label with the number "126". At the beginning of the First World War, Erich Heckel trained as a medic and was fortunately assigned to an ambulance squad at the Ostend ambulance station, led by the Berlin art historian Walter Kaesbach. Kaesbach actually succeeded in saving numerous artist friends from direct deployment to the front by enlisting them in the ambulance service. Besides Heckel, Max Beckmann and Heinrich Nauen are among them. The division of service allowed the artists to continue painting and drawing, and their stay in Flanders was repeatedly reflected in their motifs. At that time, in 1914, Erich Heckel switched in his paintings from oil paint to tempera paints prepared by himself, the so-called "First World War Tempera" made of casein, and also experimented with distemper and egg tempera. He retained this technique until about 1919/1920. There are no statements from himself as to what prompted him to make this change. It can be assumed that during the war it was difficult to procure commercially available painting materials and especially oil paints. But presumably the actual trigger for the turn to tempera painting is a completely different one: during his time in Flanders Heckel visits the museum in Brussels, where he is deeply impressed above all by the painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" (also "The Ploughman") by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The artist Max Kaus, a medical orderly under Kaesbach together with Heckel, later reported on it: "The panel is painted in tempera, bright and unvarnished it presents itself as if it had just been painted (...). Heckel loved this picture very much. (...) I am convinced that the sight contributed a great deal to Heckel expressing himself more and more in tempera painting, in egg tempera as well as in casein tempera." (Max Kaus, Mit Erich Heckel im Ersten Weltkrieg, in: Brücke-Archiv, H. 4 (1970), p. 514). During these war years, in addition to numerous landscapes, Heckel also regularly painted flower still lifes such as this one. Here he used transparent tempera colours to make the flowers particularly delicate and small, so that they appear almost Old Master-like, as in Bruegel's work. The whole arrangement, with the transparent glass vases reflected in the smooth tabletop and the fine, yellow-greenish curtain fabric, which in turn picks up the colours of the flowers, gives the viewer a pleasant feeling of the ephemeral. Heckel thus visibly returns to the primal theme of the floral still life as a symbol of the transience and vulnerability of life, which he certainly experienced more intensely than ever during the war period. Not at Vogt; Hüneke 1918-15. Exhibition: Special exhibition Erich Heckel. Paintings. Grafik, Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover 1919, cat.-no. 57; First exhibition of contemporary German art, Krefelder Kunstverein im Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld 1920, cat.-no. 10.No. 10. Provenance: Klaus Gebhard, Elberfeld (1919); Erich Heckel, Hemmenhofen/Berlin (exchange, c. 1931); Galerie Alex Vömel, Düsseldorf (1948); Karl Reuss, Moers (1948); Lempertz, Cologne 28.5.2009, lot 76; Hampel, Munich 4.12.2009, lot 769; private property, Munich; Karl & Faber, 5.6.2014, lot 544; private property, southern Germany. Taxation: differential taxation (VAT: Margin Scheme)