From Impressionism to Pure Form

Willi Baumeister's work largely represents the development of abstract painting in Germany and Europe. His first works, though, still show the influence of his academic training and in particular the styles prevalent at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Organic Forms and Movement

In 1928 Willi Baumeister took on a professorship in Frankfurt am Main. In these years the forms in his pictures grew increasingly softer. He developed new ideas and gradually replaced the severe constructivist painting with organic form. In this way he was able to turn more strongly to the motif of movement. In this phase, paintings with sand increasingly appeared that materially and formally approached what he admired on cave painting.

Baumeister's painterly development was not interrupted by the loss of his professorship in Frankfurt in 1933. His work and its development were correspondingly varied, even in the period after the National Socialist assumption of power. Out of a highly painterly work phase, he developed the extraordinarily reductive, organic, and symbol-like Ideograms in this brief work section beginning around 1936.

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.