Willi Baumeister

Work description for JACQUES CALLOT GEWIDMET (Dedicated to Jacques Callot), 1941 | Willi Baumeister assembled the group of figures that populate the elongated format from amorphous puzzle pieces. The viewer tries to assign the elements to body parts - eyes, noses, legs, heads. They seem to float in front of a light background, which is divided by some color fields. The oil painting proves his search for primordial forms. The juxtaposition, the lack of any perspective and the earth-colored background are reminiscent of cave painting. Through the title Baumeister implies an influence by the engraver, etcher and draftsman Jacques Callot (1592-1635). In his Florentine years, the latter specialized above all in the depiction of festive processions at court with curious figures and social outcasts. A sequence of an (acting) scene can also be guessed at by Baumeister. Later Callot will go down in art history as a depictor of the horrors of the Thirty Years' War. Baumeister's work thus gains another dimension that symbolizes the horror of the war years in which the picture was created. The picture was created in the year he was banned from painting and exhibiting, in the midst of the war. His teaching at the School of Arts and Crafts in Frankfurt had already been curtailed when the National Socialists came to power. He used the time until 1941 for numerous exhibitions in other European countries. And he did not allow himself to be restricted in his creative work either, continuing to work artistically despite surveillance and ostracism. During the war years, he also created a cycle on the Gilgamesh epic with 64 sheets, which was acquired by the Friends of the Stuttgart State Gallery in 1980. The saga, created 2,600 years before Christ in Mesopotamia in the city of Uruk, contains two major themes, the search for immortality and the great flood. The archaic-looking sheets strongly resemble the present work in their formal language and oscillate between figure, sign language and ciphers. Also partly humorous features of the figures can be recognized in the sheets. Therefore it seems obvious to see the oil painting as a kind of preliminary study. Baumeister's fame as the "Chief of Modernism" earned him a professorship at the Stuttgart Art Academy and numerous commissions after the end of the war. More than half of his works were created between the end of the war and 1955, the year of his death. Willi Baumeister also distinguished himself in art theory, especially through his writing "Das Unbekannte in der Kunst" ("The Unknown in Art", 1947), with which he wanted to introduce the public to the nature and tasks of modern art. At the same time, the work made an important contribution to strengthening German abstraction and was an important stimulus for informal art. (E.W.)