Heinrich Vogeler

His print graphic works for the Insel publishing house in Leipzig, for which he, amongst other things, illustrated the fairy tales by Oscar Wilde (1910), made him one of the most renowned illustrators of the Jugendstil. In 1908, Vogeler founded the „Worpsweder Werkstätten“ for furnishings and furniture making and worked on designs for the arts and crafts on a large scale. His interior fittings for the Güldenkammer in the old town hall of Bremen of 1905 is considered to be one of the major works of the reform movement. The First World War became his personal and artistic turning point: in 1918, Vogeler became politically active and founded the communist worker’s commune Barkenhoff in Worpswede. Here, from 1920 onwards, first agitation paintings with communist content in a dynamic style originated, with reference to an expressionist futuristic vocabulary of shapes. In 1931, following previous travels, Vogeler permanently emigrated to the Soviet Union where he devotes himself to Communism until his death in 1942. His so-called complex paintings in the style of the Socialist Realism, amongst others, originated here, portraying propagandistic revolutionary topics within layered or compartmentalised pictorial scenes.