Directions lithographic print

Carl Hoeckner was born in Munich in 1883, to a family with a long line of artists. Carl immigrated to Chicago in 1910 supporting himself as an illustrator at the Armour Meat Packing Company for four years and then at Marshall Field’s until the end of World War I. In the 1910s and 1920s, he allied himself with other progressive Chicago artists to do “effective pioneer work for ‘modernism.’ The trauma of World War I radicalized Hoeckner and his art. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Hoeckner created paintings and prints “representative of his emotional records caused by the world war, the steel age, and the jazz age.” His renderings, which depict “the mud swirl of industry,” the raw energy of jazz music, and the economic devastation of the Depression, were characterized as “large, vivid, drama colorings, recognizable for their suggestion of certain subterranean qualities.” In his lithographs from the 1930s, Hoeckner’s talents as a printmaker and his activism coalesced to produce “social documents” reflecting his ideals of justice.

Adapted from: http://www.chicagomodern.org/artists/carl_hoeckner/