35 - Willi Baumeister, Abstract Archaic Figures, large drawing from 1948

Willi Baumeister, Abstract Archaic Figures, large drawing from 1948 Friedrich Wilhelm Baumeister, 1889 - Stuttgart - 1955, German painter, graphic artist, stage designer, typographer, art theorist, author and university lecturer; here: Archaic linear forms with figurative elements, stylistically strongly reminiscent of Baumeister’s Gilgamesh cycle, charcoal with partial frottage (rubbing technique), on cream-coloured paper, 30 x 46 cm, signed and dated on the left 48, previously mounted under a passepartout, provenance: from an old private collection in southern Germany About the artist: The year 1948 marks one of the most productive and pioneering phases in Willi Baumeister’s career. Following the repression during the Nazi dictatorship - characterised by a ban on practising his profession, his classification as a ‘degenerate artist’ and exhibition bans - he found himself in the midst of a phase of radical artistic renewal. At that time, he was teaching as a professor at the Stuttgart Academy of Fine Art and played a key role in establishing non-representational, abstract painting in post-war Germany. For Baumeister, 1948 was also a high point in theoretical terms. His groundbreaking essay ‘The Unknown in Art’, which he had written in secret during the war, had been published shortly before (in 1947). In it, he defended non-representational art against the fierce criticism of post-war society. He understood his art as a free, evolutionary drive for discovery: the artist begins at ‘zero’ and attempts, through dynamic, creative primal forces, to make the invisible visible. At the same time, in 1948 he enjoyed an enormous exhibition presence both at home and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the Galerie Neupert in Zurich and the Galerie Otto Ralfs in Braunschweig, which cemented his status as a leading figure of German modernism.