However,they alsoreaffirmed the importance of figuration asaconduit for the
powerful attachments that connected the working class to older formations of
the people and the folk. They recognizedthatcombiningboth modalities
could onlybeachievedthrough an active engagement with Marxist thought, a
processthat requiredaclear understandingofthe role of artists and the institu-
tion of art in bourgeois society.For thatreason, their pictorial method (or style)
must be evaluated as an integralpart of theirpolitical critique,their typological
approach analyzed asaprocess-based method of class empowerment,and their
formal intervention seen asaprefiguration of new socialrelations and emotional
connections.
Some of the reasons for the scholarlyneglect of the Cologne Progressives
have to do with the kind of regionalism that does not fit easilyintoBerlin-centric
narratives ofWeimarpolitics and culture. Other explanations involvethe domi-
nant narrative of art history that still classifiesmodern German artaccordingto
apolitical postwar definitions of modernism and theavant-garde. The continuing
political provocation of the Cologne Progressivescan be traced from an early
West German reception that appropriated Seiwert and his colleagues for existen-
tialist humanist interpretations and nostalgic local historiesto the group’srecent
denunciation as sillyLegoland artists in the sectarian DKP party press.¹⁴In the
two main scholarlystudies on the Cologne Progressives, art historians UliBoh-
nen andLynette Roth have provided rich accounts of the unique historical and
geographic conditions that made Cologne bothaprovincial center andaEuro-
pean citywith strongties toBelgium and the Netherlands. In the city’sartiststu-
dios and exhibition spaces,transnational experiments in modern design and so-
cial reform metwith adistinct brand of left-radical communism and Rhenish
Catholicism.It is easy to see how Seiwert’sdidactic exploration of image-text re-
lationsreferences populartreatments of the Passion of Christ and the livesofthe
saints. Closelyrelated,Bohnen notes strong similarities to the medievalBlock-
buchtechnik (block-book technique).¹⁵ As Dirk Backes has shown, Seiwert,
Hoerle, and Arntzlater disagreed on whether an aesthetic of resistancecould
be developed through the resistant qualities inherent in visual forms, with Hoerle
eventuallyturning to portraits and still livesand with Arntz (together with Otto
Neurath)developing an almost scientific system of pictorial statistics. Nonethe-
The recent referenceappears in Dietmar Spengler,“Klassenkampf im Legoland,”Unsere Zeit,
28 March2008. http://www.dkp-online.de/uz/4013/s1301.htm,1March2017. The DeutscheKom-
munistischePartei(DKP) is the successor part of theWest German KPD.Legoland obviouslyre-
fers to the famousplastic construction toys.
Uli Bohnen,FranzW.Seiwert 1894– 1933 .Leben undWerk(Cologne:KölnischerKunstverein,
1978), 17.
214 Chapter 11