| During the Weimar Republic (1918-1933), German artists and critics championed different, often opposing, strategies aimed at synthesizing art and left-wing politics. These endeavors ranged from propagandistic expressionist print work in the immediate post-war period to the use of new technologies such as film and photography to serve the aims of the German Communist Party (KPD) in the late 1920s and early 1930s. My dissertation addresses the strategy formulated by the gruppe progressiver kunstler (group of progressive artists), more commonly known as the Cologne Progressives, in the context of these broader debates.;Never a member of the KPD and dismissive of party politics in general, the leading theorist of the Cologne Progressives, Franz Wilhelm Seiwert (1894-1933), made an impassioned call to unify artistic form and socialist content. Seiwert and two of his closest associates, Heinrich Hoerle (1895-1936) and Gerd Arntz (1900-1988), placed enormous pressure on the strict compositional structure and tactile surface of the artwork. They considered these formal characteristics inextricable from their desire to participate in the formation of a future socialist society. In his definition of Handwerk (craft) as the visible process of art-making, Seiwert rhetorically situated his project in opposition to what he saw as the formal values of Neue Sachlichkeit (commonly translated as New Objectivity), a popular term for representational painting in the 1920s characterized in large part by smooth surface finish. My analysis of Seiwert's critique of painters such as George Grosz and Otto Dix challenges current assumptions of Neue Sachlichkeit as synonymous with socially critical Weimar-period painting. Based on extensive primary research, including detailed analysis of contemporary art criticism and previously unknown artworks, my detailed case study argues for the necessary reevaluation of the role of the relationship between painterly techniques and radical politics. In order to so, my dissertation tracks the evolution of Seiwert's thought and the artwork of the Cologne Progressives throughout the Weimar Republic. |
