The Music Lover (Viktor De Knop)

For the art of German Expressionism, the woodcut was as important a means of expression as painting. The technique forced artists to make powerful drawings without sensitive nuances, to make essential contrasts without colour shading. The members of the Die Brücke group in particular - Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff - developed the technique into an autonomous means of expression. This drawing by Frits Van den Berghe was created during his exile in the Netherlands during the First World War and show the influence of these German artists. The artist applied their planar structure, and forsook perspective and preferred a graphic directness. Van den Berghe knew the German examples from magazines such as Der Sturm and Das Kunstblatt.