Karl Völker

Train station

Train station

Karl Völker (1889 – 1962) was an architect and painter associated with the New Objectivity movement. He was born in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt. After an apprenticeship as an interior decorator from 1904 to 1910, he studied in 1912–1913 at the Dresden School of Arts and Crafts.

He was the director of the Halle Artists Group, founded in 1919 and associated with the Berlin November Group. In the early years of the Weimar Republic he contributed many articles and prints to newspapers of the KPD (Communist Party of Germany).

His early paintings, such as Industriebild (Industrial Picture, 1923) are in a constructivist style. His painting Train Station (1924) celebrates both the station—newly built by Halle's KPD government—and the unity of the massed workers descending the stairs..

Declared a degenerate artist by the Nazis, Völker had to support himself by doing architectural conservation work. After World War II he resumed working as an architect and painter.

1924