(Brücke-Museum)

Erich Heckel
Im Atelier (In the Studio)
1911

For the Brücke artists, the studio was more than just a place for creation; it was where artists worked and lived, got together with friends, and celebrated. Studios were most often located on the attic floor of apartment buildings, especially in Berlin. Living and spending the night in these spaces was, in fact, forbidden—a rule they disregarded. The studio came to emblematise their anti-bourgeois lifestyle, which was further reflected in the decor. The artists gave the often cramped and meagre spaces their own personal touches. They furnished them with paintings, textiles, and furniture they had made themselves. They painted large sections of the walls and mounted non-European art from their own collections—as seen in the drawing Im Atelier (In the Studio) by Erich Heckel.

Images from the artists’ studios reveal more than sources of inspiration and traces of artistic processes; they tell us about their lives, their everyday. Sometimes empty wine bottles show up in the background, sometimes there is a friendly game of chess, and sometimes our attention is drawn to an intimate moment in which a woman rests on a sofa to recover from the exertions of modelling.