Celebrating the life and work of Radical artist Franz Wilhelm Seiwert (March 9, 1894 – July 3, 1933)

The  radical German painter Franz Wilhelm Seiwert  was born on 9 March 1894 in Cologne, the only child of a postal worker Johann Seiwert and his wife Margarethe, née Düppenbecker.. His father came from Andernach, his mother from Oberpleis (now the city of Königswinter)Seiwert  grew up in humble circumstances, and began attending elementary school in 1900, which he completed in 1909. 

Franz Wilhelm Seiwert was severely burned by a radiology treatment in 1901 at  the  age of  seven and for the rest of his life feared he would die at a young age. This not only had a significant influence on his development, but also shaped his artistic work to such an extent that human suffering became the central theme of his work.

From 1910 to 1914, he attended the Cologne School of Applied Arts, and afterwards he worked for an architectural firm. During the First World War, Seiwert was not drafted due to his illness. Politically, he adopted a pacifist stance during this time, which was expressed in the fact that from autumn 1916 onwards he took part in the anti-war cultural lecture series in Cologne, privately organised by the writer couple Carlo Oskar (1984-1971) and Käthe Jatho (1891-1989). A close friendship developed between Seiwert and the couple, who soon gave him the name Franz in reference to Francis of Assisi (1184-1226), 

Seiwert  also came   in contact with other up-and-coming artists such as Otto Freundlich (1878-1943), who was of key importance for the stylistic development of Seiwert's work in the following years and put him in touch with important contacts, such as the Berlin publisher Franz Pfemfert (1879-1954). 

Seiwert received further inspiration for his art from the religious, philosophical and secular works of literary history that were presented and discussed at Jathos events, and which the artist dealt with in woodcut cycles, such as the Gospel of John (1917) or Homer's Odyssey (1919). 

An exhibition of expressionist graphics by German avant-gardists organized by the "Jatho" circle in 1916 gave Seiwert the opportunity to present his own work in the form of a bust of Christ. His participation brought him his first commission from the women's rights activist Mathilde von Mevissen  who entrusted Seiwert with painting the dome of her house in Cologne. 

The year 1917 saw Seiwert become closer to the pacifist-communist artist movement during this time and in the following years became an important agitator of the movement in the Rhineland and an ardent advocate of the Marxist world revolution, and was actively involved in the international discussions concerning proletarian culture during the revolutionary upsurge following the First World War. "Throw out the old false idols! In the name of the coming proletarian culture"  

He was also  frequent contributor to Franz Pfemfert's anti-militarist magazine Die Aktion, and in 1917, Seiwert became a member of Pfemfert's "Anti-National Socialist Party" (German: Antinationale Sozialistenpartei)  a political organisation originally clandestinely founded in Berlin in 1915, and after the end of the war in 1918/19  he was also co-founder of the Cologne branch of the Berlin "Working Council for Art". 

While the connection to Pfemfert had already enabled the artist to exhibit in the Berlin offices of the "Aktion" in 1919, contact with social revolutionary artistic circles in the following years opened up the possibility of participating in numerous important exhibitions in Germany, which ultimately led to Seiwert's work's public breakthrough. 

Also around 1919, the artist began writing social and cultural revolutionary, partly anarchist pamphlets that were published in socialist magazines. In these writings, the artist called for the "enslaved" proletariat to rebel against the capitalist consumer state and for the self-denial of its population.

On a political level, Seiwert demanded the removal of parties and leaders, rejecting Bolshevism and opposing the revolutionary centralization propagated by Russia, which in turn contradicted the Marxist doctrine he represented. Although  a  committed Communist  he was never  an  actual  member of the German Communist  party KPD and  was dismissive of party politics in general.. 

In 1919, alongside Max Ernst, Hans Arp and Johannes Baargeld, Seiwert was also instrumental in the creation of Cologne's significant, though short-lived branch of Dada. which was a radical artistic and literary movement that was a reaction against the cultural climate that supported the First World War. The Dadaists took an anti-establishment attitude, questioning art's status and favouring performance and collage over traditional art techniques. Many Dadaists went on to become involved with Surrealism.

Dada was an international, multi-disciplinary phenomenon that reacted against the nationalist climate supporting the First World War. The movement was defined by an anti-bourgeois, anti-establishment stance and a love of the absurd, nonsensical and ridiculous. The group even declared themselves anti-art, claiming, ‘Dada is anti-Dada!’. 

Beginning in Zurich, the movement was later developed in Berlin, Hanover, Cologne, New York, Paris and Barcelona during and after the First World War. It is now considered the first conceptual art movement and a watershed moment in the development of modern art. The Dada language evolved alongside other avant-garde movements including Cubism, Futurism, Constructivism, and Expressionism and a diverse output ranged from performance to poetry, photography, sculpture, painting, and collage.

Accounts on the discovery of the term ‘dada’ vary, although it is thought poet Richard Huelsenbeck plunged a knife into a German-French dictionary at random. The term appealed to the group, reflecting their childish sense of the absurd. It had an elastic quality, as Ball explained, ‘Dada means in Romanian, ‘Yes, Yes’, in French a rocking- or hobby horse. In German, it is a sign of absurd naivety.’   

During the First World War, Zurich was a refuge for international artists, writers and thinkers. Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings initially founded the movement in 1916 in the city’s Cabaret Voltaire, with other members including Hans Arp, Tristan Tzara, https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2014/04/tristan-tzara-441896-251263-radical.html Marcel Janco and Richard Huelsenbeck. 

The Zurich group published a Dada magazine and held numerous art exhibitions spreading their anti-war, anti-art ideas. They also held regular evening events with experimental poetry readings, music and dancing, and Tzara and Arp famously explored ‘chance’ through ripping up and scattering paper pieces onto the floor. 

In 1917, Tzara went on to found Galerie Dada on Bahnhofstrasse in Zurich and later became the leader of the movement, spreading the word through letters to France and Italy. After the end of the First World War in 1918, many artists returned to their home countries and spread Dada ideas further. In Berlin, Huelsenbeck founded Club Dada, with major figures including John Heartfield, George Grosz and Hannah Hoch. Their work reflected a fascination with technology, and took on deeper political leanings than the Zurich group. 

Kurt Schwitters was excluded from the Berlin group, due to his work’s aesthetic qualities, instead founding his own one-man group in Hanover in 1919, in which he termed his art Merz. In Cologne, Max Ernst and Johannes Theodor Baargeld formed a Dada group in 1918, later joined by Hans Arp who made series' of ground-breaking collages.

An  earlier  post on  the  movement  can  be found here. https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2016/07/dada-manifestozurich-july-141916-hugo.html

Seiwert would take part in the Dada-Constructivist conference in Dusseldorf in 1922 and then establish himself as the leader of the Gruppe Progressiver Künstler (The Progressive Group of Artists). This was a group who sought to reconcile Constructivism with a realism that carried radical political views. The style that Seiwert advocated was one of sharp graphic clarity, geometric precision and which also contained words printed on the surface whose themes concentrated on Marxist writings, on workers and on unionist principles as in Soviet era Russian Constructivism. 

As Ernst was to remember though, due to political differences, Seiwert had ultimately pulled out of taking part in the much-celebrated Cologne-Dada inaugural exhibition shortly before its opening. According to Ernst, Seiwert's decision was made on the grounds that he found their concept of Dada not revolutionary enough, or as he described it, not 'socially concrete'. 

Instead, along with the ar tists  Willy Fick, Heinrich Hoerle,  Angelika Hoerle. Anton Räderscheidt and his wife Marta Hegemann, Seiwert  founded the alternate, 'Gruppe Stupid' to which Ernst  and Baargeld,would also, for a time, be affiliated. 

The Gruppe Stupid' aimed to address sociopolitical issues through an art of proletarian character. Seiwert described the group's esthetic: "We are attempting to be so clear that everyone will be able to understand us." Räderscheidt's studio was their base of operations, but by 1920 he had abandoned the constructivist style. The group exhibited together and issued a publication, "Stupid 1", before disbanding.

While Seiwert's post-war art was primarily characterized by an expressionist-cubist style, in which sculptural works predominated alongside the often symbolic, figurative and abstract prints, from 1920/21 the artist developed a representational-constructivist formal language, partly based on medieval painting, which fulfilled his claim to simplify, symbolize and typify the motifs of his propagandistic, proletarian art. 

                    

Workers,  Franz Wilhelm Seiwert  1926     

Demonstration, Franz Wilhelm Seiwert , 1925

With the change from woodcut to linocut around 1920, Seiwert also made a change in craftsmanship in an effort to implement a socialist art. At the same time, his sculptural activity declined. The artist found motifs and themes for his socially critical works of the early 1920s in the political and social events in the Ruhr region, where radical, revolutionary tendencies and the progressive impoverishment of the working class due to hyperinflation and the Allied occupation policy were particularly evident between 1918 and 1923.  In 1921, Seiwert is known to have travelled to Berlin for the first time, where he made important contact with regard to his cultural and political activities in the artist couple Margarete (1891-1984) and Stanislaw Kubicki (1889-1943), who organised an international exhibition of revolutionary artists in Berlin in 1922 with artist and writer friends.

The acquaintances he made with László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) and El Lissitzky (1890-1941) through his participation in the international “Congress of New Progressive Artists in Düsseldorf” in 1922, meant that Seiwert increasingly dealt with abstraction in his work at this time. His visit to the Berlin “1st The “Russian Art Exhibition” in 1922 with works of suprematist and constructivist art by Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935), Vladimir Tatlin (1885-1953) and Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) had a lasting influence on his work.  

A kind of counterpoint to his previous writings on revolutionary theory was the pseudo-historiographical article "The Development of the Communist Movement in Germany", published in 1922, in which Seiwert attempted to explain the course and failure of the socialist post-war revolution. The failure of all Spartacist uprisings, which the artist believed was the fault of the Social Democrats, forced him in 1923 to believe that there was no such thing as proletarian art and culture, which meant that his social revolutionary graphics decreased significantly from 1924 onwards and he began to focus on sociological oil paintings as well as typographic and architectural work. 

He also took on advertising commissions during this time and, together with Heinrich Hoerle, worked as a consultant for the Cologne architects  Wilhelm Riphahn  and Caspar Maria Grod (1878-1931).  In 1924 Seiwert took part in the "1st General Art Exhibition of the West" in Moscow, where he exhibited again in 1926. In the same year he visited Otto Freundlich in Paris, who had emigrated there in 1924. This stay was followed in 1927 by another trip to France, to Chartres and Paris, during which he developed friendly contact with Fernand Léger (1881-1955) and Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), after whose sculpture "The Kiss" Seiwert designed the gravestone for his mother in 1929.  

Seiwert expanded his political commitment in 1925 by writing several articles for the Cologne newspaper "Sozialistische Republik". From 1927 onwards, his architectural work was reflected in his collaboration with the magazine "Westdeutsche Bauschau", for which he wrote numerous articles until 1929. Together with Gerd Arntz, August Sander and El Lissitzky, Seiwert produced works for the International Press Exhibition in Cologne in 1928, where he came into contact with the Bohemian artist Augustin Tschinkel (1905-1983).

In 1929 he founded the magazine "a-z", a journal of progressive art which he edited until its final issue in February of 1933. This became a vehicle for the exposition of Figurative Constructivism, describing its origins as "From the expressionist-cubist art-form abstract constructivism was developed, which in turn led into Figurative Constructivism"and of which his 1927 painting Freudlose Gasse (Joyless Alleyway) is one of the finest examples. 

As in the work of his fellow 'Progressive', Gerd Arntz, the simplified geometry of this painting is intentional. Seiwert saw the rigid structure of his paintings as analogous to the similarly rigid structures of life imposed upon the proletariat by the ruling powers. 

As opposed to a work depicting social disintegration and decay such as George Grosz's 1918 Gefährliche Strasse for example, (and which this painting, in some ways, resembles) the rigid structures and strict compartmentalisation of Freudlose Gasse confront the viewer with an easy-to-read diagram of social order and control. Here, the picture outlines the essential stereotypes of much of 1920s German Realist painting: the bourgeois in his bowler hat, the naked prostitute and the policeman-guardian of the establishment, all neatly aligned into subordinate performative roles within the overall structure of the nocturnal metropolis. Serving as a simple lexicon of German night-life in the 1920s.

In 1933, Nazi threats forced Seiwert to temporarily flee to the mountain range  of  Siebengebirge, but  his health was badly deteriorating, due to the incurable radiation burns he had received as a child, and after friends brought him back to Cologne, he died  on  July 3rd 1933,  just before the Nazis undoubtedly would have come for him.  The Franz-Seiwert-Straße in Cologne commemorates the artist.

Selbstbildnis (Self-portrait) by Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, 1928,