Alsen Landscape

Erich Heckel created this woodcut featuring the figure of a solitary rider in summer 1913, when he lived in the village of Osterholz near Flensburg on the coast of the Eastern Sea after the Die Brücke artists’ group had been disbanded. The isle of Alsen is situated some ten kilometres from Osterholz across the sea on the Danish side. Alsen had been known to the group’s members before. Emil Nolde was particularly enchanted by its wild nature and he decided to settle there. In Heckel’s treatment, the Alsen Landscape that is composed of constrasting black-and-white forms and clearly delineated abstract planes loses its materiality and acquires a transcendental character. The objects in Heckel’s prints of 1913 have bizarre, angular shapes that renounce all that is wavy, yet maintain their traditional meanings. Erich Heckel’s landscape continues to be a stage of mental states, as was typical of the previous works of Die Brücke’s members.