The German modernist artist’s series of woodcuts feature a geometrical analysis of a series of workplaces
Gerd Arntz was an artist and council communist working in Weimar Germany who, with the Viennese sociologist Otto Neurath, developed the Isotype system, a universalising pictorial language for use in statistics. Arntz’s 1927 woodcut series Twelve Houses of Our Time included Factory, Residential Building of Three Apartments, Prison and Warehouse and Barracks, Hospital, Stadium and Hotel. The series drew on Arntz’s Isotype work to communicate, in the simplest means possible, the injustices of a society organised under the conditions of capitalism.
All images courtesy of Kunstmuseum Den Haag