The human makes a wall. The wall gives him the sur­face. The sur­face is the pri­mor­dial means, the first ele­men­tary medi­um of paint­ing. After the war, I pro­duced sim­ple pic­tures, pro­ceed­ing from the wall, with the wall. Parts of it were raised relief-like, oth­ers were two-dimen­sion­al. I called these pic­tures “Wall Pic­tures”. […] At the time I envi­sioned a new archi­tec­ture that was not yet avail­able as a car­ri­er of these wall pic­tures, which were formed out of the ele­men­tary media.“

Thus wrote Willi Baumeis­ter in a 1934 man­u­script for http://Eduardo Westerdahl´s mono­graph about a style dat­ing back ten years that he nonethe­less nev­er lost sight of because he based near­ly his entire pro­duc­tion on the prin­ci­ples of the sur­face, sim­plic­i­ty, and orig­i­nal­i­ty.

The “Wall Pic­tures” had their begin­nings in 1919 – imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing Baumeis­ter’s return from World War I. Along with the “Wall Pic­tures”, ‘heads’, a few pla­nar com­po­si­tions, and oth­er fig­ur­al pic­tures also com­prise this sig­nif­i­cant work peri­od that char­ac­ter­izes the years up to around 1923–24. Schooled on a new under­stand­ing of form taught in Stuttgart by http://Adolf Hölzel and preva­lent among many of his pupils, Baumeis­ter invent­ed a for­mal approach that rep­re­sent­ed not only his artis­tic begin­ning, but also his break­through of the 1930s. What is more: he achieved inter­na­tion­al recog­ni­tion with these works and laid the foun­da­tion for a 35-year devel­op­ment of abstract paint­ing.

Exhi­bi­tions with Inter­na­tion­al Recog­ni­tion

In March 1922 the young artist exhib­it­ed joint­ly with Fer­nand Léger at Her­warth Walden’s ‘Der Sturm’ gallery in Berlin. That year he also showed works in a solo exhi­bi­tion in Hanover and was intro­duced in an arti­cle pub­lished in Le Cor­busier and Amédée Ozen­fan­t’s French jour­nal, ‘L’E­sprit Nou­veau’:

If Willy Baumeis­ter’s work mer­its spe­cial com­men­tary here, it is because this artist admirably strives for clar­i­ty. His paint­ings and “Wall Pic­tures” bear no trace of sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty. The rela­tion­ships of angles and planes are the sole means of expres­sion. He dis­tin­guish­es him­self through a sobri­ety and econ­o­my that are great­ly to his cred­it […]. If the rigid­i­ty of the abstrac­tion appears strange to many today: we are cer­tain that this is the right way to achieve the desired, gen­er­al­ly effec­tive mon­u­men­tal art that waits for the spaces of a bril­liant archi­tect. (Trans­la­tion from exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue, Berlin Nation­al Gallery 1989)“

For the Ger­man Werk­bund’s first exhi­bi­tion in Stuttgart in spring 1922, Baumeis­ter exe­cut­ed three wall pic­tures for the first time, which were direct­ly inte­grat­ed into the exhi­bi­tion archi­tec­ture by archi­tect Richard Döck­er (1894–1968). For the crit­ic of the ‘Stuttgarter Neues Tag­blatt’ the inter­play of archi­tec­ture and paint­ing was “the artis­tic feat of the exhi­bi­tion” (April 5, 1922). The much acclaimed coop­er­a­tion of the two artists was repeat­ed in 1924 dur­ing an exhi­bi­tion of the same name in Stuttgart.

In 1921 the wall pic­tures appeared in an art mag­a­zine for the first time. The ‘Kun­st­blatt’ crit­ic Paul F. Schmidt called Baumeis­ter’s art a nat­ur­al response to the unre­strained qual­i­ty of expres­sion­ism. And in 1922 Stuttgart art crit­ic Düs­sel spoke of clar­i­ty, terse­ness, and for­mal com­plete­ness. In pub­lic the wall pic­tures were seen as an expres­sion of a new -# con­sol­i­dat­ed -# cul­tur­al era, which after the war seems more than under­stand­able.

Organ­ism and Law: The Path to the Wall Pic­ture

Even before World War I, Willi Baumeis­ter was con­cerned with clar­i­ty of form and depic­tion in his ear­ly works. Inspired by cubism and Paul Cézanne, but also under the influ­ence of Adolf Hölzel, he, begin­ning in 1910, reduced the nat­ur­al impres­sions of what he saw to sim­ple and two-dimen­sion­al ele­men­tal forms such as the cir­cle, oval, and rec­tan­gle and grad­u­al­ly elim­i­nat­ed every­thing that sug­gest­ed spa­tial illu­sion and aer­i­al per­spec­tive.

In 1919 Baumeis­ter imme­di­ate­ly resumed this ten­den­cy with the Wall Pic­tures. The pri­ma­cy of the sur­face sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly led to the direct ref­er­ence to archi­tec­ture and ulti­mate­ly – at the two Werk­bund Exhi­bi­tions in 1922 and 1924 – to inte­gra­tion into the wall. Even so, apart from these spe­cial solu­tions, the wall pic­tures always remained ‘mobile’. They were not a mat­ter of wall reliefs or fres­coes because their com­po­si­tion and for­mal devel­op­ment was – as Baumeis­ter put it in 1934 – cer­tain­ly relat­ed to the wall and thus the sur­face, but not bound to a spe­cif­ic wall.

The Hölzel Cir­cle had already dealt intense­ly with the sub­jects of the ‘wall’ and ‘ele­men­tary media’. Ida Kerkovius, Johannes Itten, Her­man Sten­ner, Oskar Schlem­mer, Willi Baumeis­ter, and oth­ers also dealt repeat­ed­ly with the sub­ject of the human fig­ure, but always with the aim of over­com­ing what they saw as the false illu­sion­ism of nat­u­ral­is­tic rep­re­sen­ta­tion. As such the Wall Pic­tures in Baumeis­ter’s oeu­vre are exem­plary of the 1920s. The artist did not work with fig­u­ra­tion (as he briefly did lat­er around 1930 and again reject­ed), but rather with visu­al build­ing ele­ments that con­cerned fig­ures as well as machines. The Wall Pic­tures no longer had a rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al func­tion.

With the paint­ings of the ear­ly twen­ties, Baumeis­ter want­ed to bring back the ‘fun­da­men­tal laws’ (Will Grohmann) of art and in par­tic­u­lar of the human form to expres­sion – or bet­ter still, ‘to work them out’. Here­in the prox­im­i­ty to cubism, to Cézanne and to Hölzel also appears, because in the Wall Pic­tures Baumeis­ter worked with geo­met­ric mod­els, with col­ors and sur­faces, their con­trasts and pen­e­tra­tions, with emphat­i­cal­ly hap­tic sur­face struc­tures, rhythms, and ten­sions. Baumeis­ter’s aim was to rep­re­sent the essen­tial behind the arbi­trary appear­ance. Thus Grohmann is right on the mark when he calls the Wall Pic­tures the ‘com­mand­ments of art’.

Objec­ti­fi­ca­tion and Syn­the­sis

Baumeis­ter’s works of these years clear­ly reveal not only a ten­den­cy to objec­ti­fy and deemo­tion­al­ize art, but also a new ori­en­ta­tion toward con­nect­ing the once-sep­a­rat­ed arts. As Baumeis­ter him­self empha­sized in dif­fer­ent con­texts, the divi­sion of the fine and the applied arts had become insignif­i­cant for him (see arti­cles on Typog­ra­phy and Frank­furt Pro­fes­sor­ship.)

Pic­ture and wall – pic­ture and archi­tec­ture – pic­ture and space – and ulti­mate­ly: pic­ture and envi­ron­ment! These were also catch­words of the ‘Werk­bund’ and ‘Bauhaus’ artists with whom he was in close con­tact. Baumeis­ter’s wall pic­tures were nev­er just an artis­tic-for­mal exer­cise, but also always an avow­al for the inclu­sion of art into every­day life.

Archi­tec­ture in ‘Boom­town’ Stuttgart

In this con­text it is use­ful to look at the sit­u­a­tion in his home­town Stuttgart imme­di­ate­ly fol­low­ing World War I. Since the 1880s the city had been immersed in swift devel­op­ment. The issues of build­ing and liv­ing were impor­tant fac­tors in pub­lic life. In addi­tion, the new cen­tral sta­tion (archi­tects: Bon­atz & Scholer, 1914–22) was put into oper­a­tion and was to give a new sense of pur­pose to the old rail­way-track plat­forms locat­ed in the city cen­ter. Between 1919 and 1927 machines and work­ers defined the scene not only on the rail­way sta­tion con­struc­tion site, but also on the cleared grounds. Human and machine also became a theme for Baumeis­ter, art and hand­craft anoth­er. New build­ings and unseen bus­tle in a trans­form­ing soci­ety con­firmed his belief that art and life were to be seen as a unit, that a work of art should not be pro­duced or con­sid­ered in iso­la­tion.

This think­ing took on exem­plary bear­ing for Baumeis­ter in archi­tec­ture, in which the most var­ied arts came togeth­er in an every­day sit­u­a­tion. The inter­ac­tion of the painter and the space in which his works of art were to stand or hang had attained an impor­tance that for many extend­ed beyond the artis­tic. He him­self took this task into account in his col­lab­o­ra­tion with Döck­er in 1922 and 1924, but espe­cial­ly some­what lat­er in his par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Stuttgart exhi­bi­tion ‘Die Woh­nung’ (The Dwelling) in 1927 with the Weis­senhof­sied­lung (Weis­senhof Estate).

The ‘Wall’ Theme after 1924

Even though Baumeis­ter gave up the Wall Pic­tures in the nar­row­er sense around 1924, he remained con­nect­ed to the theme through­out his life­time. First, he retained the geo­met­ri­cal sever­i­ty until 1929–30. The ref­er­ence to the sur­face deter­mined all his works to the end as well. More­over, from a phys­i­cal stand­point, the wall-like and the wall as struc­ture appear repeat­ed­ly in many lat­er work phas­es by which he con­tin­ued to treat the sur­face of a great num­ber of his paint­ings and graph­ic works with, for instance, sand and put­ty, wood or film, or with comb­ing and frot­tage. He also con­tin­ued to use relief struc­tures and devel­oped them fur­ther.

Not least of all, pic­ture titles such as ‘Stein­garten’ (Rock Gar­den) (1939), ‘Tem­pel­wand’ (Tem­ple Wall) (1941), ‘Palast struk­turell’ (Palace Struc­tur­al) (1942), ‘Lin­ien­mauer’ (Line Wall) (1944), ‘Fig­uren­mauer aus Gil­gamesch’ (Fig­ure Wall from Gil­gamesh) (1945), oder ‘Blaue Mauer’ (Blue Wall) (1952) demon­strate that, for him, the artis­tic approach of the 1920s in which:

The wall gives him [the human] the sur­face. The sur­face is the pri­mor­dial means, the first ele­men­tary medi­um of paint­ing.“

remained a guid­ing prin­ci­ple until the end.