Erich Heckel, Geschwister (Siblings), 1913

Organized in 1905, Die Brücke (The Bridge) was a rebel artist group established in Dresden, Germany by four young architecture students, including Erich Heckel. Together they defied the urge toward illusionism that had characterized Western art since the Renaissance and that had become the domain of repressive academic organizations. marking the beginning of Expressionism in Germany, the group sought to form a bridge between the art of established academics and the art of the avant-garde. Together these artists created the earliest body of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints consistently representing German Expressionism, the major German contribution to modern art of the last century.

This brother-and-sister pair, whose identity is unknown, is also the subject of Heckel's 1911 painting bearing the same title. In both works the artist has set the figures in front of a window framed by curtains. The brother, whose youth is suggested by his small size relative to that of his sister, gestures with his left hand while clinging to his older sibling. The sister holds her brother on her lap and wraps him in her arms; she is focused entirely on her brother as his gaze confronts the viewer, creating a psychological tension. Adding to the uneasiness of this image are the tensions produced by the strong black and white contrasts, the bold cutting, and the incongruities and distortions of the figures in compressed space, that narrows slightly at the top.

Though the composition foreshadows Heckel's woodcut Ostende Madonna (1916), a representation of the Virgin Mary holding Christ, the themes of youth and sibling relationships are, perhaps, as significant as these latent, religious references. The 1906 Brücke Program outlines "a belief in continuing the evolution [of modern art] and in a new generation of creators as well as appreciators," realized through the active participation of youth. Young people had long been thought to have an instinctively perceptive capacity to disregard the past and its institutions and to be enthusiastic partisans of a new future. This sibling portrait, undoubtedly informed by the value
Die Brücke artists placed on youth, may therefore affirm these positive, youthful qualities. For these artists, the young embodied the process of change and were central to the identity of Brücke artists themselves, who advocated in their art free-form individualism, creativity, spirituality, and independence from officially sponsored, established art organizations.

Jeremy J. Fowler
Former Curator of Education

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