Heinrich Vogeler

Heinrich Vogeler (1872–1942) was a leading German painter, illustrator, and architect of the Worpswede artists' colony in the moors near Bremen. After absorbing Jugendstil ornament during a stay in Florence, Vogeler created the Barkenhoff, his Worpswede home, as a complete Gesamtkunstwerk of furniture, gardens, and decorative ensembles. His paintings of his wife Martha — Sommerabend, Spring — became defining images of German Jugendstil. After WWI he turned to socialist activism and emigrated to the Soviet Union in 1931, where he died during evacuation in 1942.

Vogeler painted in a richly decorative Jugendstil manner with linear pattern, jewel tones, and frieze-like compositions drawing on early Italian Renaissance and Pre-Raphaelite sources. His later Soviet-era works move toward graphic socialist realism.

Vogeler made the Worpswede colony and the Barkenhoff into one of the defining sites of German Jugendstil and helped translate Pre-Raphaelite and Italian Quattrocento ideals into German modernism.