August Tschinkel – Arbeiter [Workers]

Original linocut on paper. Sheet: 28 × 28 cm; image: approximately 17.5 × 17 cm. Signed in pencil “aug. tschinkel” beneath the image at lower right and titled “ARBEITER” in pencil at lower left. Monogrammed and dated “t 34” in the block.

A powerful figurative-Constructivist image showing seven workers assembled before an industrial complex, its factory architecture punctuated by two smoking chimneys. Tschinkel reduces the figures and surrounding machinery to an interlocking vocabulary of circles, rectangles, and sharply divided areas of black and white. The result reflects both the socially engaged aesthetic of the Cologne Progressives and the universally legible pictorial language Tschinkel developed through his work with Otto Neurath’s Vienna Method, later known as ISOTYPE. A later, artist-signed impression from the original block, probably issued by Edition Panderma, Basel in the 1970s.