The New Begin­ning:
1945 to 1949

Willi Baumeis­ter sin­gle-mind­ed­ly devel­oped an impres­sive, very per­son­al visu­al lan­guage that was unique in Ger­man art imme­di­ate­ly after 1945. The recog­ni­tion he received in the post­war peri­od, in par­tic­u­lar in the 1950s in Ger­many and abroad, was cor­re­spond­ing­ly strong. On the one hand, there are impuls­es from a vari­ety of his rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al work peri­ods. On the oth­er hand, there are also dense­ly packed abstrac­tions that char­ac­ter­ized Baumeis­ter as an out­stand­ing non­rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al artist. With­out a doubt, these paint­ings became the most renowned and were imme­di­ate­ly linked to his name by a broad pub­lic.

Delight in the Revival

Intel­lec­tu­al­ly, the end of the war was a new start for Willi Baumeis­ter. After years of iso­la­tion, he could prac­tice his art freely again (see Biog­ra­phy). Artis­ti­cal­ly, how­ev­er, there had been no stand­still for him dur­ing the years of the Nazi regime, so that he now seam­less­ly con­tin­ued the devel­op­ment of the pre­ced­ing years. In a time that was dis­tin­guished by many exhi­bi­tions, trav­els, pub­li­ca­tions, and intense teach­ing activ­i­ty, Baumeis­ter was excep­tion­al­ly pro­duc­tive.

Sur­pris­ing­ly his palette had already light­ened up before 1945, as the “Sun Fig­ures” and “Line Wall on Yel­low” (both 1944) show. Baumeis­ter undoubt­ed­ly had hoped that every­thing would take a turn for the bet­ter. To these fig­u­ra­tive­ly-con­ceived but bor­der­line non­rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al paint­ings he now linked dif­fer­ent groups of land­scapes and Wall Pic­tures. In their bold col­or­ful­ness and delight in move­ment, “Maya Wall” (1945), “Ani­mat­ed Land­scape” (1946), and “Jour Heureux” (Hap­py Day, 1947) are images of lib­er­a­tion. Titles such as “Cheer­ful Move­ment”, “With Air Fig­ures”, “Vital Land­scape”, or “In Col­ored Clouds” are also indica­tive of this phase.

With the new Wall Pic­tures and their orna­men­tal inter­lock­ing of forms and col­ors, Baumeis­ter for­mal­ly con­tin­ued the basic idea of the Africa, Cal­lot, and Per­fo­ra­tion series of 1942. He had already begun the extra­or­di­nar­i­ly painter­ly treat­ment of sur­faces around 1936. The land­scapes of 1947–48 dis­play traces of the 1938–39 Eidos pic­tures. The Stone Gar­den theme from 1939 and works with glaze spots from around 1940 also res­onate in the Ani­mat­ed Slope (1949).

In con­trast, the strong relief-like con­struc­tion of those years now most­ly gave way to a greater light­ness and two-dimen­sion­al­i­ty. This is also evi­dent in Ani­mat­ed Slope and a few Harps. In them Baumeis­ter var­ied the rock- and scratch-draw­ing theme that had occu­pied him since around 1930. There are numer­ous oth­er exam­ples of this recon­sid­er­a­tion. They evince the con­tin­u­ous change in Baumeis­ter’s work, rather than a regres­sion.

Pri­mor­dial Cre­ation as Sym­bol for the Recon­struc­tion

The­mat­i­cal­ly he still explored the archa­ic world, whose eter­nal valid­i­ty appeared all the more impor­tant to him in the peri­od of recon­struc­tion and new­ly gain­ing a sense of iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. The tak­ing up and new­ly inter­pret­ing of avail­able con­cepts exists through­out Baumeis­ter’s entire oeu­vre, but is espe­cial­ly appar­ent at this time.

Inspired by a small object in his own col­lec­tion, the “Aztec Cou­ple” of 1948 exem­pli­fies this sort of artis­tic recon­sid­er­a­tion – as do sev­er­al Giant, Epoch, and Peru motifs. But it also sym­bol­izes the pri­mor­dial art and human at the begin­ning of cre­ation and the cre­ative act. This out­look took on par­tic­u­lar weight dur­ing Baumeis­ter’s pro­fes­sor­ship between 1946 and 1955.

Empha­siz­ing the Moral Stand­point

Dur­ing the war Baumeis­ter turned inten­sive­ly to draw­ing and pro­duced sev­er­al cycles on mytho­log­i­cal themes and the Old Tes­ta­ment. He now lith­o­graphed a few of these cycles and arranged them into the “Salome” (1946) and “Sumer­ian Leg­ends” (1947) port­fo­lios. He also trans­ferred numer­ous oth­er motifs of his drawn and paint­ed works of ear­li­er year –not just of the wartime – into the medi­um of lith­o­g­ra­phy and, begin­ning in 1950, into silkscreen prints, thus mak­ing them acces­si­ble to a broad­er audi­ence.

In con­trast to the draw­ings of 1943–44, Baumeis­ter used col­or in some lith­o­graphs to stress par­tic­u­lar pic­to­r­i­al com­po­nents or to reveal dif­fer­ent effects. But he also used it in the orig­i­nal graph­ic work to vary some ideas. With the aid of col­or and the frot­tage tech­nique, he lent many graph­ic works a painter­ly qual­i­ty where­by he essen­tial­ly turned many leaves of this phase into a media between draw­ing and paint­ing. In this con­text, he also turned to the relief as an expres­sive form in the graph­ic prints, which remained an excep­tion in the paint­ings between 1945 and 1949 (e.g. Brown Relief Pic­ture from Gil­gamesh, 1946).

The aims that Baumeis­ter had pur­sued with his draw­ings dur­ing the war years were still valid now. Despite the demise of the Nazi dic­ta­tor­ship, the issues of pow­er abuse and resis­tance, faith, and human­i­ty had lost none of their impor­tance. The lith­o­graphs and port­fo­lios offered him the chance to once again inten­si­fy his stand­point with artis­tic means.

The Fig­ure as a Mea­sure for Art

In con­trast to a few of the pure­ly non­rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al efforts of the 1920s and 1930s, essen­tial­ly all the paint­ings in the first years after 1945 remained – in vary­ing degrees of abstrac­tion – com­mit­ted to the fig­ure, if not just the human fig­ure. This would change only occa­sion­al­ly in the last five years of his pro­duc­tion. Even so, new pic­to­r­i­al ideas emerged in the fol­low­ing phase that would typ­i­fy Baumeis­ter’s aver­sion to every form of stand­still.