The Cologne Progressives were an informal group of artists based in the Cologne/Düsseldorf area who came together following the First World War and participated in the radical workers' movement. The group was founded by Gerd Arntz, Heinrich Hoerle and Franz Wilhelm Seiwert. The group related their attitude to art to their political activism. As Wieland Schmied put it, they "sought to combine constructivism and objectivity, geometry and object, the general and the particular, avant-garde conviction and political engagement, and which perhaps approximated most to the forward looking of New Objectivity [...] ". They originated Figurative Constructivism.