Construction of the Nivskaya Hydro Power Station. Murmansk region

By 1933 Vogeler was living in the Soviet Union, having committed himself entirely to the communist project. The construction of the Nivskaya Hydroelectric Power Station in the Murmansk region was precisely the kind of subject the Soviet state commissioned from sympathetic artists: industrial progress, the transformation of wilderness into socialist infrastructure, the heroism of collective labour in extreme conditions. Vogeler had been invited to document Soviet industrial achievements and he painted several such sites with the same earnest commitment he once brought to the pastoral world of Worpswede. The shift from fairy-tale gardens to Arctic hydroelectric stations represents one of the most dramatic personal trajectories in twentieth-century European art. Vogeler would die in Kazakhstan in 1942, displaced during the German invasion. This canvas, painted nine years before his death, is a document of his complete political and artistic transformation.

The Soviet-period industrial paintings show Vogeler adopting a more direct, descriptive approach than his earlier Symbolist work. Forms are clearly legible, scale is emphasised to convey the enormity of the construction, and colour is straightforwardly documentary rather than emotionally modulated. The paint handling serves content rather than aesthetic effect.