Cologne Progressives

The Cologne Progressives (Kölner Progressive) were a group of politically radical artists formed around Cologne after the First World War. Growing out of Dada and the circle around Max Ernst and Franz Seiwert, they rejected both bourgeois naturalism and pure abstraction, developing a lean, angular figuration intended to speak to the working class. Close to the Communist Party, they organized workers' exhibitions, published graphics, and sought an art that was at once modern and usable for political education. Their hard-edged, flattened figures and constructivist construction made common cause with left international art of the Weimar years. The rise of the Nazis ended the group: Seiwert died in 1933, and much of their work was later condemned as degenerate art.

Defining characteristics

• Lean, angular figuration with flattened, constructivist planes
• Hard edges and cool, reduced color
• Political subject matter: workers, the crippled and wounded, city life, anti-fascism
• Graphics and illustration made for workers' organizations
• Dada irreverence disciplined into a program of usable, modern art

Key figures

• Franz Seiwert (1894-1933) — Theorist-painter of the group's constructivist figuration
• Heinrich Hoerle (1895-1936) — Painter of workers and spare, geometric figures
• Gert Arntz (1900-1988) — Graphic artist of flat, pictogram-like woodcuts
• Angelika Hoerle (1899-1923) — Dada-inflected painter of the group's early years

Sources

• Cologne Progressives - Wikipedia encyclopedia

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