Willi Baumeister

Dismissed by his teacher Poetzelberger due to lack of talent, he switched into the composition class of Adolf Hölzel, with whom he studied until 1912, where he met his lifelong friend, Oskar Schlemmer.

In the same year, Adolf Hölzel arranged a commission for wall paintings at the Deutsche Werkbund-Ausstellung (German Werkbund Exhibition) in Cologne for Baumeister, Schlemmer, and Herman Stenner.

In 1920 Baumeister completed his art studies, worked as an independent artist, and participated in exhibitions in Berlin, Dresden, and Hagen.

During these years, Baumeister developed professional relationships with artists such as Paul Klee, Léger, Le Corbusier, Amédée Ozenfant, and Michel Seuphor.

In 1936 he was introduced by the Wuppertaler architect Heinz Rasch, with whom he work during the 1924 Exhibition in Stuttgart, to Dr. Kurt Herberts, the owner of a varnish factory in Wuppertal.

He began working for the company in 1937, joining other artists ostracized by the National Socialist regime: Franz Krause, Alfred Lörcher, Georg Muche, and Oskar Schlemmer, and the art historian Hans Hildebrandt.

In 1943, when a bomb attack rendered Wuppertal as well as Baumeister’s house in Stuttgart uninhabitable, he moved with his family to Urach in the Swabian Alps.

Here Baumeister met Fritz Winter, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Paul Fontaine, and many others who worked in the field of fine arts after the end of the war and the dictatorship in Germany to forge a new beginning and connection to international developments.

In his participation in the Erstes Darmstädter Gespräch (First Darmstadt Dialogue) in July 1950, at the exhibition Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (The Human Image of Our Time), Baumeister defended modern art against Hans Sedlmayr's thesis of a "loss of the center" ("Verlust der Mitte").

Various work groups emerged at this time, including the relief-like wall pictures, and paintings with sports theme (as a symbol for modernity).

Parallel to this development, nonrepresentational painting began to gain a foothold in works that centered on geometric shapes and their relationships to one another in the picture (e.g. Planar Relation of 1920).

Indeed, as it was for many of his fellow artists, posing such questions was part of the agenda of the modern age (for example, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, Fernand Léger, Amédée Ozenfant, Le Corbusier, Paul Klee).

Although this development could also be observed concurrently in the work of other artists of his time, in Baumeister’s case, it was tied to his fascination for the prehistoric and archaic paintings.

This experience was undoubtedly important for Baumeister’s artistic disposition since he, evidently inspired by this rich store of prehistoric works, ultimately used extraordinarily reduced organic shapes for his "ideograms" (beg.

As an indefatigable researcher and collector, Baumeister also owned examples of African sculpture, in which he, as in the case of the prehistorical artifacts, saw universal images for life, development, and human existence.

Both the titles and formal language reveal Baumeister’s preoccupation with other old (Latin American) cultures (Peruvian Wall, 1946, and Aztec Couple, 1948).

Another example of his search for the “foundations of art” is Baumeister’s transposition of the Gilgamesh Epic, one of the oldest surviving literary works.

1943), which resulted in an astonishingly unified cycle, which with his pictorial language came strikingly close to depicting the literary and linguistic effects(impression) of the epic.

In this way, Baumeister single-mindedly and successfully developed a very personal and impressive visual language that was and still is unique in the German art immediately after 1945.

On the one hand, he developed his painting further in a virtuosic manner and, what is more, combined the variety of his formation phases in many other pictures—in part into "overalls structures" that nonetheless still possessed a fundamental that was reminiscent of landscape imageries (Blue Movement, 1950).

In contrast to the "French classics" of Modernism, or the important American artists of the second half of the twentieth century, Baumeister receives only a scant amount of attention in the Anglo-Saxon world.

Among the German painters who remained in the country despite the persecution by the National Socialists from 1933 to 1945, only a few succeeded in achieving such pioneering strides toward new contents and forms.