Wounded Sailor, 1915

About the Work

During the First World War, Heckel had time for his artistic pursuits only after nightfall, if at all. Among others, he sketched and portrayed medical orderlies and wounded soldiers. Owing to the leaflet-like combination of image and text, the woodcut “Wounded Sailor” is in a category of its own. The artist depicted the wounded man like a martyr before a white, cross-shaped form, his face rutted with sharp gashes. Heckel’s friend the poet Ernst Morwitz (1887–1971) had composed the patriotic lines: “Curved ship’s keel once furrowed wonder flood. Death of Flanders does not tame hot blood.”

About the Acquisition

From 1900 onwards, the Frankfurt chemist and industrialist Carl Hagemann (1867‒1940) assembled one of the most important private collections of modern art. It included numerous paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints, especially by members of the artist group “Die Brücke”. After Carl Hagemann died in an accident during the Second World War, the then Städel director Ernst Holzinger arranged for Hagemann’s heirs to evacuate his collection with the museum’s collection. In gratitude, the family donated almost all of the works on paper to the Städel Museum in 1948. Further donations and permanent loans as well as purchases of paintings and watercolours from the Hagemann estate helped to compensate for the losses the museum had suffered in 1937 as part of the Nazi’s “Degenerate Art” campaign. Today, the Hagemann Collection forms the core of the Städel museum’s Expressionist collection.