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Artists from A-Z Rudolf Maeglin

1892–1971
  • Skelettbau (1938)
    Skelettbau
    Artist: Rudolf Maeglin Dating: 1938 Type: Painting Material: Oil on canvas Measures: 116,7 x 176,5 cm Acces / purchase date: 1963 Inventory number: 0256 Copyright: © Nachlass Rudolf Maeglin; Foto: Christian Baur, Basel
Maeglin laid the foundations for his personal style during the Paris period of 1922-27, which matured without any sudden changes from the 1930s onwards. Through his involvement with French naïve painting and German Expressionism, he arrived at a simplified drawing, which fixes the pictorial space to a clearly organised, parallel-perspective framework of lines and rhythms it through strong colour contrasts and fine chromatic gradations. After returning to his hometown in 1927, his artistic interest focused on the world of building sites and chemical factories with the people employed there, who had become familiar to him as workmates. In his late work after 1960, his preoccupation with the occupational and living situation of the workers and their families is expressed in vivid, usually strictly frontal portraits. Through his ostensibly naïve depiction of what he saw without pathos or sentimentality, Maeglin created an independent work that stands out from paintings of socialist realism with similar themes and is close to the workers' pictures of Fernand Léger. The transposition of pictorial motifs into the medium of woodcut points to the close relationship between his painted and graphic work.

Due to his thematic restriction, he became an outsider artistically, whose importance within Group 33 was only recognised late. His paintings, which depict the gradual transformation of Basel through the large buildings, are culturally and historically significant testimonies to the city's recent architectural history.

Silvan Faessler: «Rudolf Maeglin». In: SIKART Lexikon zur Kunst in der Schweiz, 2016 (erstmals publiziert 1998).