Art: Shadow of the Bridge

Erich Heckel is old—80 this week. The vital and violent movement that he and two colleagues, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and the late Ernst Kirchner, started nearly six decades ago is now a part of both history and legend. There is proof, in a current show of Heckel's work in the stately main hall of the Stuttgart Staatsgalerie, that passion and emotion once flamed as hotly in this old man as ever in any iconoclastic rebel. But he now lives quietly and serenely in an orchard-ringed farmhouse on Lake Constance, sometimes reminiscing about a youth...