Carl Hoeckner

ORBITS - Large Hoeckner lithograph

c 1935

Carl Hoeckner was born on December 19, 1883, in Munich, Germany to a family with a long line of artists. His early art education began under his father, an etcher, and flourished through formal study at art academies in cities throughout Germany and in Belgium. Hoeckner immigrated to Chicago in 1910 and followed this advice, 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. His early paintings from this period are highly decorative and richly colored, such as Salome, his first picture exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1913. Hoeckner continued to show his paintings and prints at the Art Institute in group and solo shows into the mid-1930s, winning awards in 1922 and 1923 and garnering critical notice in the press. During his career, Hoeckner participated in numerous group exhibitions with the Chicago Society of Artists and Chicago Society of Etchers and showed two of his paintings at the Century of Progress Exposition in 1933. He exhibited in other major US cities: in New York with the Society of Independent Artists (1918, 1928–29) and at the National Academy of Design (1942–43), and at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1921). He taught at the School of the Art Institute from 1929–43 to supplement his work as a fine artist. Through his teaching, original oil paintings, lithographs, and social activism, Hoeckner left behind an enduring legacy of the art scene in Chicago during the Depression.