On July 4, 1921, a friend from Rotterdam wrote to the Stuttgart artist Margarete Oehm, asking: “Tell me, how is your painting coming along?” To this day, her art is rarely encountered; it remains virtually unknown. Margarete is better known as Margrit Baumeister, the wife of the artist Willi Baumeister (1889–1955). Yet in 1924, she exhibited alongside Baumeister at the Second Stuttgart Secession. She was represented there with the work “Badende” (Bathers). (Fig.) However, the Secession exhibition and another in 1925 at the Kunstkabinett on Friedrichsplatz in Stuttgart were Margarete’s only public appearances. In 1987, works were shown posthumously in a retrospective exhibition on the Stuttgart Secessions. One or two of her works were displayed at each of these three exhibitions. With the exhibition “The Ladies’ Class—Women Artists Conquer Modernism,” Margarete’s work is presented for the first time in a comprehensive overview. Through 22 works and two sketchbooks, visitors can gain an impression of her artistic development and her illustrative, thoroughly amusing visual language. Her small but exquisite artistic oeuvre was created between 1916 and 1926 and comprises nearly 280 works, mainly works on paper.
The works of Margrit Baumeister and Margarete Oehm can now be rediscovered in an online catalog of works.
The online catalog raisonné of Margarete Oehm (1898–1978) is an open-access project. The artist’s life and artistic work have been critically examined for the first time. All works, autographs, and texts in this catalog are published under the CC BY-NC-SA license to facilitate quick and easy academic research and publication.
