x1961-40: Self-portrait

Heckel was one of the four architecture students and self-taught painters who founded the artists’ collective Die Brücke in Dresden in 1905. Mixing the rhythms of modern life with a keen interest in non-Western tribal arts, the group worked communally to promote an energetic, thoroughly modern style of German painting. Printmaking became central to the group’s activities, which included a modernist revival of sixteenth-century German woodcut technique, coarsely carved and printed by hand.