Great dancing pair
(Grosses tanzpaar)
(1923)

• Erich HECKEL

In 1905 Erich Heckel was among a small circle of artists who 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 pre-war and wartime Expressionist paintings and prints.

With art supplies scarce during the Second World War, artists frequently used both sides of a canvas or painted over earlier works. Large dancing couple was revealed only recently, Heckel having painted over it with a layer of distemper, perhaps to hide what may have been considered a ‘degenerate’ or modernist image that would have met with Nazi disapproval. In 1939, he also painted a beautiful landscape of a fjord on the back of the earlier painting of the dancers seen here. While the NGV’s collection boasts many fine prints by German Expressionist artists, including Heckel himself, this is the first painting by a member of that important movement to enter the collection.