Great dancing pair
(Grosses tanzpaar)
(1923)
- Medium
- oil on canvas
- Measurements
- 121.2 × 96.5 cm (image) 128.1 × 103.2 cm (canvas)
- Place/s of Execution
- Germany
- Inscription
- inscribed in brown paint on reverse l.r.: EH39
- Accession Number
- 2015.374
- Department
- International Painting
- Credit Line
- National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne
Purchased with funds donated by John Downer AM and Rose Downer AM, 2015
© Erich Heckel/ARS, New York. Licensed by Copyright Agency, Australia
This digital record has been made available on NGV Collection Online through the generous support of Digitisation Champion Ms Carol Grigor through Metal Manufactures Limited - Gallery location
- Late 19th & early 20th Century Paintings & Decorative Arts Gallery
Level 2, NGV International - About this work
-
In 1905 Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Fritz Bleyl and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner founded the German Expressionist Die Brücke group in Dresden. Painted some eighteen years later, Large dancing couple is a confident expression of the relatively high spirits felt in Germany at the height of the Weimar Republic. Heckel’s work at this time was markedly more decorative than his prewar and wartime Expressionist paintings and prints. With art supplies scarce during the Second World War, artists frequently used both sides of the canvas or painted over earlier works. Heckel painted over Large dancing couple with a layer of distemper, perhaps to hide what may have been considered a ‘degenerate’ or modernist image that would have been met with Nazi disapproval. In 1939 he also painted a beautiful landscape of a fjord on the back of the earlier painting of dancers seen here.
- Subjects (general)
- Human Figures Leisure, Games and Sport
- Subjects (specific)
- couples dancers dancing (activity) Germany (nation) musicians nightclubs stages (performance spaces)
- Movements
- German Expressionism (movement)
