  About the Artwork
  
  
  Titled laconically Woman, this painting features Siddi Reha, a former dancer and the artist’s wife. Erich Heckel frequently used Siddi as a model for his paintings and woodcuts, although, as here, she is rarely identified by name. While Siddi’s face is finely depicted with a certain attention to detail, Heckel endows her with a high forehead and small chin, traits he often incorporated in his portraits regardless of who was his model. Siddi’s body and the space surrounding her are defined less precisely, with markedly looser and broader brushwork.   


The setting is Heckel’s summer studio in Osterholz on the Baltic Sea coast in Germany. Heckel decorated the studio’s walls and its slanted roof with murals of female and male nudes among stylized flowers, seen here as the sunflowers and a squatting nude bearded man to the left and right of Siddi. Heckel originally painted the murals as expressionist idylls celebrating uncorrupted existence in nature. But by the time he made this painting in 1919, in the wake of the horrors of World War I, his generation’s hopes for a physical and spiritual renewal were shattered. Siddi’s portrait projects instead a brooding mood of quiet melancholy.
  
  
  Title
  Woman
  
  
  Artwork Date
  1920
  
  Artist
  Erich Heckel
  
  
  
  Life Dates
  1883 - 1970
  
  
  
  
  Nationality
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Definitions for nationality may vary significantly, depending on chronology and world events.
  Some definitions include:
  Belonging to a people having a common origin based on a geography and/or descent and/or tradition and/or culture and/or religion and/or language, or sharing membership in a legally defined nation.
  
  
  
  German
  
  
  
  Culture
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Cultures may be defined by the language, customs, religious beliefs, social norms, and material traits of a group.
  
  
  
  
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  Medium
  Oil on canvas
  
  
  Dimensions
  Unframed: 31 1/2 × 27 1/2 inches (80 × 69.9 cm)
  Framed: 39 5/8 × 35 5/8 × 2 1/2 inches (100.6 × 90.5 × 6.4 cm)
  
  
  Classification
  Paintings
  
  
  Department
  European Modern Art to 1970
  
  
  Credit
  City of Detroit Purchase
  
  
  
  Accession Number
  
  
  
  This unique number is assigned to an individual artwork as part of the cataloguing process at the time of entry into the permanent collection.
  Most frequently, accession numbers begin with the year in which the artwork entered the museum’s holdings.
  For example, 2008.3 refers to the year of acquisition and notes that it was the 3rd of that year. The DIA has a few additional systems—no longer assigned—that identify specific donors or museum patronage groups.
  
  
  
  21.205
  
  
  Copyright
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