Artist Mark Vallen's essay on Conrad Felixmuller.

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Workers on Their Way Home
Conrad Felixmuller
Oil on Canvas 1921

Workers on Their Way Home is a typical example of the artist's early expressionist style, skewed perspective, distorted figures, and bright clashing colors.

Conrad Felixmuller attended the Dresden Art Academy from 1911 to 1915. He provided artworks to the radical expressionist magazines, Der Sturm (The Storm) and Die Aktion (GGG).

in March 1919, founded the Dresden Secession Group along with fellow artists Otto Dix, Will Heckrott, Lasar Segall, Otto Schubert, and Constantin von Mitschke-Collande. Felixmuller was an ardent communist who wanted to forge a new, proletarian aesthetic.

The Dresden group issued a manifesto that stated in part: "The founding of the group was a natural outgrowth of the re-awakened, innermost yearnings to depart forever from the old means and ways and to find, while preserving absolutely the freedom of personality, new expressions for the new world surrounding us." Felixmuller's paintings were shown in the National Gallery in Berlin in 1923, but by 1937 the Nazis banned his art, designating him an entarteten Künstler ("degenerate artist"). The fascists displayed Felixmuller's paintings in their infamous 1937 exhibit, Entartete Kunst ("Degenerate Art"). In 1944 the artist was press-ganged into the fascist army, but was almost immediately captured by the Soviet Red Army and sent to a POW camp. After the liberation of Germany, Felixmuller taught art at Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany from 1949 to 1962. Conrad Felixmuller died in West Berlin, Germany in 1977.