Born in Austria, Joseph Vogel moved with his family to Poland as a young boy. They immigrated to the United States in 1927, settling in New York. Vogel studied at the National Academy of Design from 1929 through 1932 and at the Art Students League in 1933. Socially and politically engaged, he was a founding member of the American Artists Union and traveled to Spain in 1937 to fight against the fascists.
Throughout the 1930s, Vogel was engaged with public art projects funded by the New Deal. He worked with Ben Shahn and Lou Block on a mural painting at Riker’s Island under the Temporary Emergency Relief Administration in 1934 and 1935, and the following year he joined the FAP graphic arts division. He produced prints there and contributed to the color lithography project led by Gustave von Groschwitz and Russell Limbach.
The New School for Social Research hosted Vogel's first solo show soon after his return from Spain in 1938. He became a member of both the National Society of Mural Painters and the Mural Artists Guild that year. In 1939, he exhibited prints at the New York World’s Fair and the Whitney Museum Invitational Exhibition, to which he contributed for several years. Also in 1939, Vogel went to Mexico to experience firsthand the art of mural painters Diego Rivera and José Orozco.
Vogel moved to Los Angeles. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Vogel enlisted in the U.S. Army as a combat cameraman, and he photographed the concentration camps at Auschwitz. Returning to California, he taught documentary film at USC for a year before traveling to Paris to re-immerse himself in the arts. There, he befriended Tristan Tzara and Man Ray. When he returned to California, he taught at the Chouinard Art Institute, worked as a filmmaker and wrote scripts for television.
