ized relations ofrespect aremade visiblehere throughacompositional approach
that emphasizes the mutuallyconstitutive processes of individuation and social-
ization. Solidarity,inHonneth’sterms,presupposes the culture of belongingin
which self-esteem becomes possible. In Seiwert’swork, this shared experience
is captured in the quiet spirit of determination that,asenacted through the for-
mal means ofrepetition and reduction, is sustainable even in moments of defeat.
At the sametime, the workers’demand for recognition is inseparable from what
NancyFraser,inher famous2003 debatewith Honneth, calls the“demand for
redistribution”–still called class struggle in 19 25 – and whatremains the the-
matic focus and organizing principle throughout Seiwert’sentireoeuvre.
In 1920,Franz Wilhelm Seiwert,togetherwith Heinrich Hoerle (1893–1936),
Gerd Arntz (1900–1988), and several others, founded the artists’group called
the Cologne Progressives. Like manyartists of theirgeneration, they wereradi-
calized by the traumaticexperience ofWorld WarIand the pervasive sense of
crisis and possibility after the revolutionary uprisingsof1918/19. Forthem, the
new world of mass mobilizations–in the trenches,factories,and big cities–re-
quiredradicallydifferentmodes of representation and, by extension, forms of
engagement.AsCologne-based painters,photographers,architects, and graphic
artists, theyrespondedinparti culartothe profound sense of political instability
that made the Rhinelandasymbol of German defeat for the nationalist right,
and thattransformed the adjacentRuhr region,home to Germanyscoal and’
steel industries,intoacenter of revolutionary ferment.Brought together in
their desire,to paraphrase Arntz, to unite the politically revolutionary with the
formallyrevolutionary,the painters in the group made the workingclass their
main artistic subjectand intervention depicting workers in the factories and
dailylife in the tenements and uncovering the social and economic inequities
produced by modern capitalism.¹²Convincedofthe emancipatory potential of
modernist forms and techniques,they relied specificallyonthe clarifying func-
tion of clear lines andgeometric formstodefine the meaningofsocial types
and explore the formation of collective bodies. In the words of Seiwert,their
overarchinggoal wasto“representareality stripped of all sentimentand arbitra-
ChristianeWilke (London:Verso,2003). On Honneth’sreevaluation of socialism, seeTheIdeaof
Socialism:TowardsaRenewal,trans. Joseph Ganahl(Cambridge:Polity,2016).
GerdArntz, quoted byLynetteRoth,Painting asaWeapon: Progressive Cologne1920–33.Sei-
wert—Hoerle—Arntz,trans. UtaHoffmann(Cologne:WaltherKönig,2008),17.Onart and culture
in Cologne during the 1920s, also seeWulf Herzogenrath, ed.,VonDadamax zum Grüngürtel.
Köln in denzwanzigerJahren(Cologne:KölnischerKunstverein, 1975). Aside fromthe workof
Bohnen andBackes, Roth’scataloguefor the2008 exhibition at the MuseumLudwigin Cologne
remains one of the few scholarlyassessments of Seiwert in recentyears.
212 Chapter 11