Rudolf Maeglin

Rudolf Maeglin was a Swiss artist known for his use of vivid colors. 

Biography of Rudolf Maeglin

Born in 1892, Rudolf Maeglin grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Basel, the son of a wine merchant. His mother came from a wealthy family of silk industrialists. After graduating from high school, Maeglin pursued the study of medicine, completing it with the state examination in 1918.

Following a brief stint as an assistant doctor at the Cantonal Hospital in Geneva, he made a pivotal decision in 1919 to forsake the medical profession and pursue a career as a freelance artist. 

Following a trip to Italy in 1921, Rudolf Maeglin resided in Paris from 1922 to 1927, attending the academies Grande Chaumière and Colarossi. During this period, he undertook study trips to Brittany, Spain, and the Balearic Islands.

Maeglin became a founding member of Group 33 in 1933, actively participating in its significant exhibitions.

Until 1936, he worked as a laborer on construction sites and as an unskilled worker in chemical industry factories during the day. In this working environment, he discovered the pictorial themes with which he would exclusively engage from that point onward.

Transitioning to a freelance career in 1936, he focused on painting and graphic art, particularly woodcuts, and later joined the Xylon Association. In 1947, the architect Ernst Egeler, a friend of Group 33, constructed a modest studio house for him in the working-class district of Kleinhüningen, where Maeglin resided until his passing.

From 1960 onward, declining health compelled him to cease painting outdoors. Rudolf Maeglin passed away in 1971. 

Rudolf Maeglin's Art Style

Maeglin established the groundwork for his distinctive style during the Parisian period from 1922 to 1927. This style matured with a gradual evolution from the 1930s onward. Influenced by his exploration of naive painting in France and German Expressionism, he developed a simplified drawing technique. This technique anchored the pictorial space within an organized, parallel-perspective framework of lines and rhythms, employing strong color contrasts and delicate chromatic gradations.

Upon returning to his hometown in 1927, Maeglin redirected his artistic focus toward the world of construction sites and chemical factories, depicting the people working there.

In the 1930s and '40s, he depicted these Farbarbeiter ("color workers"). Employing a characteristic style—simple shapes, bright colors, flat perspective—Maeglin crudely rendered these fine-featured workers in oil on canvas and board, continuing to depict Basel's laborers and construction sites until his death.  

In his later works post-1960, Rudolf Maeglin expressed an examination of the professional and living circumstances of workers and their families through powerful, mostly strictly frontal portraits. Employing a superficially naive portrayal, devoid of pathos or sentimentality, Maeglin crafted an independent body of work that distinguishes itself from thematically related paintings of socialist realism. Instead, it aligns closely with the working-class paintings of Fernand Léger.