Heinrich Hoerle's painting - The rediscovery of a a small and high-class oeuvre
The catalog raisonné of the Cologne painter Heinrich Hoerle lists just 96 oil paintings, 28 of which are listed as missing. The painting "Fabrikarbeiter"(Factory Worker), which was only rediscovered in 2010 and which is one of the highlights of Hoerle's oeuvre due to its formal clarity and socio-critical ruthlessness, was still considered lost in the year the catalog raisonné was published. Hoerle, along with the photographer August Sander and the painter Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, was one of the protagonists of the group "Kölner Progressive Künstler". His outstanding work, which unfortunately fell into oblivion in the 1970s, found late deserved appreciation in the exhibition “Köln progressiv 1920-33. Seiwert - Hoerle – Arntz" at the Ludwig Museum Cologne in 2008. Before the National Socialist’s campaign "Degenerate Art", to which some of Hoerle's paintings fell victim, his works - disturbing and at the same time inspiring due to their reduced clarity – had already been represented in the collections of numerous German museums and in international exhibitions. Today a large part of the work is in the collections of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, and the Von der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal.

From Dada to New Objectivity - The "Factory Worker" as a socio-critical masterpiece
After the First World War Hoerle was initially part of the Cologne Dada group around Max Ernst and Johannes Bargeld, but soon broke away from Ernst's international Dada efforts, as he was striving for a more nationally oriented, more political art. In 1919 Hoerle became friends with his artist colleague Anton Räderscheidt, who initially founded the group "Stupid" with Heinrich Hoerle and Hans Arp and finally in 1932 the "Gruppe 32" together with Hoerle, Seiwert and Heinrich Maria Davringhausen. As far as his style was concerned Hoerle fused clear, reduced pictorial elements of New Objectivity, Constructivism and French Cubism, but in terms of content he showed a socio-critical tendency reminiscent of Otto Dix's work. "Farbrikarbeiterin" is an early and outstanding document of these artistic endeavors, which also find expression in the relentless directness of Hoerle's "Krüppelmappe" (Cripple Portfolio) and in his paintings of people stricken by the terrors of the First World War.
De-individualization through war and industrialization - Hoerle, Dix and Grosz
With the facial features as signs of a burdensome life, Hoerle's "Fabrikarbeiterin" shows clear parallels to Dix's famous work "Bildnis der Eltern", of which he created two versions (Kunstmuseum Basel / Sprengel Museum, Hanover) and to his painting "Frau mit Kind" at the State Art Collections, Dresden, whereas Hoerle, owing to his stronger stylization and the strict formal reduction, significantly emancipates himself from the realistic model. Hoerle's "Fabrikarbeiterin"also shows clear parallels to the contemporaneous works by the Berlin artist George Groszs, who in his painting "Grauer Tag" (1921, Nationalgalerie Berlin) stages the unrelated typifications of a faceless worker, a war cripple and a magistrate for the welfare of war victims in front of smoking factory chimneys. Just as it was the case with Dix and Grosz, to Hoerle the 1920s were not the "Roaring Twenties". Instead Hoerle confronts us with images of a lost generation of war cripples and factory workers who - as a consequence of their de-individualized work - appear like automatons. [JS]