Erich Heckel

"We saw your [ Cuno Amiets ] work with feelings of admiration and enthusiasm.. .Our group [ Die Brücke ] would be exceedingly glad to find in you a comrade in arms and a champion of its cause."

"I still remember the first time [ c. 1903-04] when Heckel who had started to draw a plant in the broad white and black manner of a woodcut, stopped bothering to observe the overlapping and the movements of the leaves and instead got down something on the paper that bore a distant resemblance to the overall form of the object. When I criticized the drawing for its carelessness he invoked his right to stylize.. .He said that the only important thing so far as he was concerned was the seizure of a total expression."

"..differences arose that hindered the publication of the Chronik (written by Kirchner and brought us to the agreement of dissolving Die Brücke group."

"As far as I can see, as a printmaker Erich Heckel essentially developed out of the woodcut. Because it imposes the necessity to simplify, it is a good means of education.. .Sometimes it charmed him to take advantage of the nature and quality of specific woods; in that way he cut the weather-beaten face of an old man in oak that had lain in the moor for hundreds of years."

"Quote of Claire Louise Albiez, in: Brücke und Berlin: 100 Jahre Expressionismus; submitted to the Division of Humanities New College of Florida, Sarasota, Florida, May 2013, p. 51"

"What we [Brücke-artists] had to remove ourselves from [the German bourgeois mores] was clear; where we were heading was certainly less clear. (original German: Wovon wir weg mussten, war uns klar. Wohin wir kommen würden, stand allerdings weniger fest)."

"He [ Otto Mueller ] himself omitted certain things in his pictures that his contemporaries deemed to be of importance, in order to capture the essence.. ..with the greatest possible simplicity."

"The first encounter with Otto Muellers paintings was in Berlin, at the showing of the Rejects of the Berlin Secession. which took place at the Galerie Macht in the spring of 1910. And we met him personally the very same day in his studio on Mommsenstrasse. This meeting was significant for all of us and occurred at a fruitful moment; and, as a matter of course, he belonged to Die Brücke community from then on."

"Heckel was inclined to feel that he dared not advance further on this path without inflicting violence on the style of the woodcut. He found the lithograph as a substitute."

"Landscapes became more important and more numerous when Heckel and Schmidt-Rottluff decided to make their first trip [together] to Dangast in 1907. Heckels paintings at this stage still show the same violent brushwork as his friends, modeled on Van Gogh. The pictures are set down on the canvas spontaneously and quickly, with short curving strokes. The predominant colours are saturated reds, greens and blues.. .But Heckel soon recognized the dangers of these wild, uncontrolled storms of colors.. ..the reflection, the intellectual discipline, characteristic of Heckel, are already apparent by 1908.."

"In 1905 I had the opportunity to observe Heckel outside the foor walls of the art room. I took thirty of my students [in architecture] on an excursion.. ..I found him in front of Grünewalds Pieta.. ..and with the greatest of care he had copied the hands that are movingly wrung over the dead body in his sketchbook.. .Then later [ in the train through the country] he suddenly pulled out his sketchbook again and began to scrawl passionate smudges on its pages.. .. and a great roar of Heckels sketching and shouts of laughter ran through the whole coach.. .When the time came [some days later] I was delighted to find that the boys gave the first price to Heckels sketchbook, although most of it seemed rather mad to them."

"He often got up at night in order to seize that seen within, which quickly with a crayon, quickly with a broad brush, he brought onto the stone, and the use of acid allowed him to bring out the finest and most capricious tones. Through all the preciosity of the treatment these works preserve exactly the characteristic features of the lithographic technique."