Great dancing pair
(Grosses tanzpaar)
(1923)
Medium
oil on canvas
Measurements
121.2 × 96.5 cm (image) 128.1 × 103.2 cm (canvas)
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
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.
Artwork Details
Place/s of Execution
Germany
Inscription
inscribed in brown paint on reverse l.r.: EH39
Accession Number
2015.374
Department
International Painting
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
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)