Gerd arntz biography of michael myers

In spite of obvious disparities of the political climate of then and now, the connection between inequality and the emergence of ideology and demagogy is nevertheless striking. Gerd Arntz is one of the more unusual, if less well-known, artists of the Weimar Era. Like his more famous contemporaries George Grosz and John Heartfield, Arntz wanted to strip art of bourgeois preciousness.

In order to efface all evidence of his individual hand, he invented a stylized vocabulary of symbolic forms. Arntz was born in the small industrial town of Remscheid, near Solingen, into a family dominated by business and factory owners. Prior to the First World War where he served with the Prussian field artillery for half a year , his contact with art involved little more than fleeting visits to exhibitions and lectures.

These experiences would inspire his later woodcuts. Opposing the conservative instruction at the school, Arntz derived his own knowledge of art from contemporary publications such as Der Sturm , Die Aktion and Die Ziegelbrenner. In , he joined an initially loose group of Communist artists, who later organized and demonstrated against the military and police.

1In the first decades

Eventually, Arntz designed around pictograms. The individual figures in his woodcuts represented statistics, and the images were often interspersed with graphs and accompanied by articles expounding upon the status of the working class. In , Arntz emigrated to The Hague, where he continued to produce woodcuts and linoleum cuts until the end of his life.

During an artistic career spanning 50 years, he has continually criticised social inequality, exploitation and war in clear-cut prints- activism through artistic means. Gerd Arntz — and Isotype 13 October— 13 November