‘The mysterious power of a work of art lies in its formal-abstract component, and in the relation of the representational to its artistic deformation. In all eras, art proceeded and gave the canon the purified view for the eye of humanity’ – Willi Baumeister

Emerging from one of the most turbulent periods in modern history, Willi Baumeister lived and worked through two World Wars over the course of his rich and prolific career. Born in Stuttgart, Germany in 1889, the artist is renowned for his exuberant and vivacious style characterised, at the height of his practice, by a colourful lexicon of biomorphic abstractions. Working alongside artists such as Paul Klee, Fernand Léger, and Joan Miró, Baumeister was integral in shaping the language of art in a world twice ravaged by warfare and destruction. With their vibrant visual articulations, playful optimism and enigmatic charm, his dynamic paintings offered a vital antidote to the trauma of the war years through a universal syntax of colour, shape and form.
A painter, graphic artist, stage designer and typographer, Baumeister was a man of many trades. He came from a family of craftsmen and at the age of sixteen undertook an apprenticeship as an interior decorator. After serving in the army for a year in 1908, he began his formal art education under Adolf Hölzel at the Stuttgart Academy, where his classmates included Oskar Schlemmer and Otto Meyer-Amden. During this time he developed what was to become a lifelong fascination with the work of Paul Cézanne, and indeed the influence of his radical, fluid palette can be traced in Baumeister’s own oeuvre. He was called up for military service during World War I, and it was after this turbulent period that his style truly began to come in to its own. He experimented with Constructivism, unconventional media and both figurative and abstract art in the years that followed. In Paris he established friendships with Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant, and, as his reputation grew, began to exhibit his work across Germany and France. He turned increasingly to abstraction to convey a sense of raw vitality, drawing from ancient sources such as hieroglyphics, calligraphy and prehistoric cave paintings. By the time the National Socialists had risen to power in 1933, Baumeister had established a rich iconography of organic forms. He was subsequently labelled a Degenerate under the Nazi regime, and dismissed from his professorship at the Städel School, where he had taught since 1927. Five of his works were shown in the National Socialist exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) in 1937. He spent the rest of the Second World War in Stuttgart and, despite being ostracized by the Nazis, continued to show his work abroad, with exhibitions in Milan in 1935 and Paris in 1939. By the time the war ended, Baumeister’s international reputation remained untarnished and, in rejecting what he increasingly came to see as the staid and confining conventions of figuration for an uninhibited and wild abstraction, the artist projected a powerful vision for a new, peaceful and liberated world.
Executed in 1947, the surface of Blaue Figurenhalde [Blue Figure Jumble] is bustling with an explosion of colours, contours and geometric forms. Quick bursts of scarlet red, royal blue, turquoise, amber and yellow erupt across the pictorial plane atop a sky blue backdrop. A strip of bright vermillion presides over the kaleidoscopic canvas like a burning sky at sunset. The painting was composed in the same year Baumeister published his seminal apologia for abstract art, On the Unknown in Art. During this period, he painted his Metaphysical Landscape series, developed between 1946 and 1954, and indeed the painting evokes a surrealistic realm that hovers ambiguously between figuration and abstraction. Painted in 1952, Schwebender Schild [Floating Shield] generates a sense of cosmic mystery and universality through its bold, primary hues and primordial vocabulary reminiscent of the cave paintings which so inspired the artist. The works produced in these latter years mark the period of the artist’s finest achievements. As his friend the critic Will Grohmann aptly wrote, ‘Seldom had Baumeister been so lighthearted and playful. In his middle fifties he was experiencing a new adolescence ... a cheerful optimism took hold of him and accompanied him almost without a break to the end of his life’ (W. Grohmann, Willi Baumeister: Life and Work, New York, 1966, p. 108).