Figure Sketch (Figurenskizze)

1927

Erich Heckel was a founding member of Die Brücke (The Bridge), the pioneering German Expressionist movement that resisted the strictures of academic art in favor of a freer, more emotional approach. It was inspired by what was then known as “primitive art,” mainly meaning non-Western painting and sculpture, especially from Africa and the Pacific Islands. Here, Heckel depicts a group of nude men in an idyllic rural landscape. The German Expressionists’ work was denounced by Adolf Hitler as “degenerate” in 1937, in part because of their unorthodox depictions of the nude. By 1944, Heckel’s woodblocks and printing plates had been destroyed by the Nazis, and other of his works were lost in Allied bombing raids.

Heckel’s painting Roquairol (1917), in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, inspired Iggy Pop’s pose for the cover of his album The Idiot.