Inno­va­tion or replace­ment?

Using the exam­ple of Stuttgart artist and acad­e­my pro­fes­sor Willi Baumeis­ter (1889–1955), this research project exam­ines how the scarci­ty of tra­di­tion­al paint­ing mate­ri­als dur­ing the Sec­ond World War affect­ed his choice of mate­ri­als and the cur­rent state of preser­va­tion of his paint­ings. Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est are the mate­ri­als new­ly intro­duced dur­ing the Sec­ond World War, such as ear­ly syn­thet­ic binders, nov­el colourants and image car­ri­ers such as hard­board: did he see them exclu­sive­ly as tem­po­rary – and per­haps infe­ri­or – sub­sti­tutes for tra­di­tion­al mate­ri­als, or were they able to estab­lish them­selves as inno­v­a­tive mate­ri­als in his art even after the end of the war? How do these mate­r­i­al changes affect the con­di­tion of his paint­ings?

These ques­tions relat­ing to art tech­nol­o­gy and con­ser­va­tion sci­ence are being inves­ti­gat­ed using the exten­sive col­lec­tions of paint­ings and archival mate­ri­als held by the coop­er­a­tion part­ners – the Baumeis­ter Archive at the Kun­st­mu­se­um Stuttgart (Had­wig Goez) and the Willi Baumeis­ter Foun­da­tion, as well as the Staats­ga­lerie Stuttgart.

The Schoof Foun­da­tion is sup­port­ing the project by cov­er­ing the costs of com­plex mate­r­i­al analy­ses, which are being car­ried out in coop­er­a­tion with the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty of Cologne, the Deutsches Muse­um in Munich, the Doern­er Insti­tute of the Bavar­i­an State Paint­ing Col­lec­tions (Munich), the Insi­TUM Lab at the Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty of Munich under the direc­tion of Dr Clarim­ma Ses­sa (Chair Prof. Dr. Thomas Dan­zl) and Prof. Dr. Óscar Andrey Her­rera San­cho (Hum­boldt Fel­low, 5th Insti­tute of Physics, Uni­ver­si­ty of Stuttgart).

Anoth­er key objec­tive of the project is to com­mu­ni­cate both the research process and the results to dif­fer­ent tar­get groups. To this end, project-relat­ed com­mu­ni­ca­tion for­mats and an exhi­bi­tion at the Kun­st­mu­se­um Stuttgart (sched­uled for 2027) are being devel­oped with finan­cial sup­port from the Wüsten­rot Foun­da­tion. The project will con­clude with an inter­na­tion­al sym­po­sium at the ABK Stuttgart, which will take place par­al­lel to the exhi­bi­tion.

The new web­site is now online:

ioe-baumeister.com

Project man­age­ment:
Prof. Dr. Wibke Neuge­bauer https://www.abk-stuttgart.de/personen/wibke-neugebauer.html
Had­wig Goez https://www.kunstmuseum-stuttgart.de/archiv-baumeister
ABK Stuttgart https://www.abk-stuttgart.de/gemaelde-und-skulpturenrestaurierung