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Wounded Sailor (Verwundeter Matrose)

1915
Not on view
Heckel embraced the woodcut technique for its expressive potential and its links to earlier German artists and craftsmen. While serving in a medical unit in Belgium, he made many pictures of the injured, including this portrait of a sailor with bandages wrapped tightly around his head like a turban. Heckel achieved a raw, unrefined aesthetic that corresponds to the primitive brutality of the war; gashes he cut in the wood to create the image parallel the sailor’s wounds, suggesting both physical and psychological scars. The man’s sacrifice is suggested by the cross-like area of uninked parchment that frames him. Because paper was scarce, Wounded Sailor was printed on the back of a found seventeenth-century Dutch manuscript page.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Wounded Sailor (Verwundeter Matrose)
  • Artist: Erich Heckel (German, Döbeln 1883–1970 Radolfzell)
  • Date: 1915
  • Medium: Woodcut
  • Dimensions: Sheet: 16-1/16 x 13-5/16 inches (40.9 x 33.9 cm)
    Block: 14-1/4 x 11-7/16 inches (36.3 x 29 cm)
  • Classification: Prints
  • Credit Line: Gift of Dietrich von Bothmer, 2002
  • Object Number: 2002.234.3
  • Rights and Reproduction: © 2025 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
  • Curatorial Department: Drawings and Prints

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