About the work

The Wachau, the river landscape of the Danube between Melk and Krems, the place of discovery of the famous Venus of Willendorf and a section of the Limes Germanicus, is today part of the UNESCO World Heritage natural and cultural site. The wine and fruit orchard region flanked by the hills of the Dunkelsteinerwald and the Waldviertel had already become a destination for excursions of Viennese toward the end of the nineteenth century. The artists of the academy there discovered the picturesque qualities of the charming landscape for the visual arts. Some of them even settled in the villages of the Wachau, which offered striking motifs with its meadows and forests, the castles, chapels and fortresses, the river and the sometimes quite high rock formations.
The Heckel couple visited the area for the first time in 1940, followed by annual stays in Austria and Carinthia, Styria, the Vienna Woods and the Wachau by 1943. The choice of the motif with the grapevines on the plain, the hills with their terraces and fields, three slim, climbing poplars, as well as a pair of small houses with red roofs captures the typical features of the landscape. The artist allows his gaze to roam over the vines of the foreground, which he - captured with a loose brushstroke - reproduces as an area of delicate and detailed patterns progressing at an angle against one another. In quieter areas on the other hand, a large part of the line of hills rises up, while the also flatly painted summer sky arches above it expansively. The ornamental structure of areas and lines of Heckel’s late landscape works with their abstract tendencies are already apparent in the spirited blue lines at the lower edge of the mighty cloud.