Franz Wilhelm Seiwert

German painter

Franz Wilhelm Seiwert (March 9, 1894 – July 3, 1933) was a German painter and sculptor in a constructivist style. He was also politically active as a communist making significant contributions, both graphic and theoretical to Die Aktion. Seiwert was born in Cologne. He was seriously burned in 1901, at the age of seven, in an experimental radiological treatment. As a result, he subsequently lived with the fear that his life would be short. He studied from 1910 to 1914 at the Cologne School of Arts and Crafts. In 1919 he met Max Ernst and took part in Dada activities. He was invited to exhibit in the large Dada exhibit in Cologne but withdrew at the last moment. In that same year he formed the Stupid group which included Heinrich Hoerle and Anton Räderscheidt. According to Ernst, "Stupid was a secession from Cologne Dada. As far as Hoerle and especially Seiwert were concerned, Dada's activities were aesthetically too radical and socially not concrete enough". His first large solo exhibition was in Cologne at the Kunstverein in 1923,

Seiwert was the leading theorist of Figurative Constructivism describing its origins as "From the expressionist cubist art form abstract constructivism was developed, which in turn led into Figurative Constructivism". When Hitler came to power in 1933, Seiwert briefly fled to the mountain range Siebengebirge, but his health was badly deteriorating, and friends brought him back to Cologne, where he died on July 3, 1933.

Die Aktion ran from 1911 1932. Seiwert made 43 contributions (see Wikisource (German language)):

In the two years from 1917 to 1919 Seiwert had seven untitled woodcuts published in Die Aktion.