Works of the bridge artists

After Max Ernst and Otto Pankok, the cabinet exhibition was devoted to selected prints by the artists' group "Brücke," founded in 1905. Works by its co-founder and important forerunner Erich Heckel were shown, complemented by a selection of prints by his renowned colleagues Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

The centerpiece of the exhibition was a rare woodcut by Erich Heckel, acquired in 2011 from an art dealer and presented for the first time as a new addition to the collection. Painted in 1923, the portrait "Kopf Thorn Prikker" shows the likeness of the painter and craftsman Johan Thorn Prikker, who is represented with central works in the collection of the Clemens-Sels-Museum Neuss. Heckel and Thorn Prikker met through the Hagen collector Karl Ernst Osthaus, who commissioned them to design a chapel together in 1912, laying the foundation for their long friendship. Together with the woodcut, the cast of Thorn Prikker's death mask from 1932 was also presented for the first time. The bronze, created by Wolfgang Wallner, was presented to the Clemens-Sels-Museum Neuss in 2011 as a "gift from the LETTER Foundation Cologne in memory of August Hoff and Irmgard Feldhaus".