Hoerle and Franz Wilhelm Seiwert collaborated regularly with the Dadaists in the formative years of the movement. In 1919 they became involved with the avant-garde communist newspaper Der Ventilator which they co-edited with Max Ernst, Otto Freundlich and J. T. Baargeld. In the same year Hoerle decided to split from the Dada group, which he considered fundamentally bourgeois, and set up a rival group with Seiwert which they initially called Stupid and later renamed the Rheinische Progressive. Working mainly in the Cologne area, the group conceived their own brand of constructive painting which they termed Social Constructivism. Their works of the early 1930s represent social constructivism in its purest form (see this and the following three lots).