Heinrich Vogeler

Träume (Dreams). 1911, Eremitage Museum, Moscow, Oil on Canvas

Baku. (Komplexbild), 1927, oil on canvas, Nationalgalerie, Berlin

Construction of the Nivskaya Hydro Power Station. Murmansk region, 1933-34, color pencil on paper, State Ethnographic Museum of Karelia, Petrozavodsk

Labor Camp. Petrosavodsk, 1933-34, watercolor on paper, State Ethnographic Museum of Karelia, Petrozavodsk

Heinrich Vogeler started his artistic journey with Art Nouveau paintings and drawings for which he is most famous now. During the First World War he became a radical pacifist and socialist, following the ideas of Proudhon that he tried to implement as member of the Barkenhoff Commune. Radical pacifism first prevented him from becoming a member of the German Communist Party (KPD), but in 1925 he joined the party, only to be evicted four years later. After his move to Moscow in 1931 he was involved in several activities of the Soviet society and more and more adapted to the Stalinist version of the Communist idea. After leaving the Komplex Bild behind (denunciated as bourgeois), he turned to Socialist Realism style drawings and paintings. In 1941 he died following his forceful evacuation to Kazakhstan as enemy alien.