About the work

A spring greeting from Erich Heckel:The painter presents us with a bouquet of yellow narcissi in full bloom in a bulbous jug with feet and a handle. While the flower vase stands on a dark ground, a brilliant blue in two different shades rises behind it, separated by a zestful yellow stripe. One immediately thinks of the rays of the sun in the cloudless sky of a clear spring day. The artist signed, dated and titled his work on another narrow stripe of yellow in the lower right third of the painting.

When Erich Heckell painted this wonderful sheet in watercolours and black chalk, the years of the Brücke artist group shared with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Max Pechstein and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff were long past. The painter had already embarked on his own aesthetic paths many years before. The still life was especially important in all phases of his work. He dedicated himself to the genre from the early days of Brücke after 1905 until his late work of the 1950s and 1960s. It reaches its initial zenith in his painting oeuvre with flatly arranged floral still lifes in the 1920s.