Gerd Arntz
Gerd Arntz was a German Modernist artist renowned for his black and white woodcuts. A core member of the Cologne Progressives, he was also a council communist. The Cologne Progressives participated in the revolutionary unions AAUD and its offshoot the AAUE in the 1920s. In 1928 Arntz contributed prints to the AAUE paper Die Proletarische Revolution, calling for workers to abandon parliament and form and participate in worker's councils. These woodcut prints feature recurring themes of class.
Biography
Born into a family of Protestant merchants, Arntz was educated at a private academy in Düsseldorf and later attended the school of applied arts in Barmen. He acquired the Düsseldorf studio of Otto Dix in 1925, when Dix moved to Berlin. Arntz travelled widely through Europe, and lived in Vienna, Cologne, and Moscow among other cities. Arntz was a core member of the Cologne Progressives art group.From 1926 Otto Neurath sought his collaboration in designing pictograms for the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics. From the beginning of 1929 Arntz worked at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum directed by Neurath in Vienna. Eventually, Arntz designed around 4000 pictograms.
Between 1931 and 1934 he travelled periodically to the Soviet Union in order to help set up the 'All-union institute of pictorial statistics of Soviet construction and economy', commonly abbreviated to IZOSTAT.
After the brief civil war in Austria in 1934 he emigrated to the Netherlands, joining Neurath and Reidemeister in The Hague, where they continued their collaboration at the International Foundation for Visual Education. Arntz cultivated a wide acquaintance among the artists and political activists of his generation.