Heinz Bodamer: Med­i­tat­ing with Forms and Col­ors Alone

Heinz Bodamer (1927–2022) attend­ed Baumeis­ter’s class from 1946 to 1950. His activ­i­ties include work­ing as a com­mer­cial artist and as an inde­pen­dent painter and graph­ic artist in Stuttgart.

For the inau­gur­al sum­mer semes­ter in 1946, the Stuttgart Acad­e­my of Arts at the Weißen­hof was to some extent rebuilt. The stu­dents par­tic­i­pat­ed a good deal in the recon­struc­tion.

Through the works I sub­mit­ted, I was admit­ted to the paint­ing class and first enrolled with Prof. Steisslinger. But I very soon real­ized that my deci­sion was not a good one, even though Prof. Steisslinger was an esteemed thor­ough­bred painter. After a semes­ter I then switched to Prof. Baumeis­ter’s [class] and became his stu­dent in the win­ter semes­ter of 1946. My time as Prof. Baumeis­ter’s stu­dent last­ed eight semes­ters, until 1950. The first impres­sions were that Baumeis­ter stu­dents paint­ed very ver­sa­tile­ly. This impressed me right away, but more so Baumeis­ter him­self and his entire per­sona.

The “Didac­tic Boards” present Baumeis­ter’s ele­men­tary basic teach­ings as far as I can still remem­ber and were made for an acad­e­my exhi­bi­tion at the Weißen­hof. With this basic the­o­ry as a foun­da­tion, Baumeis­ter then deep­ened and extend­ed the Advanced School he estab­lished in his book, “The Unknown in Art”. The book was pub­lished in 1947 and we read it eager­ly. Forty years lat­er I read his book again with the same enthu­si­asm and see his pic­tures as a new, sym­pa­thet­ic art form.

Baumeis­ter once said that his paint­ings want­ed to be under­stood as pic­tures for pure vision. This expres­sion is so eas­i­ly said, but in my opin­ion, med­i­tat­ing with noth­ing but forms and col­ors, with pure paint­ing, is in fact the most dif­fi­cult.

In 1951 I went with a let­ter of rec­om­men­da­tion from Baumeis­ter on a study trip to Paris. After­wards I was a stu­dent of [Erich] Heck­el and [Hel­mut Andreas Paul or HAP] Grieshaber at the Karl­sruhe Acad­e­my of Arts and there received a state schol­ar­ship for the Roman Acad­e­my of Arts. Dur­ing a study stay in Lon­don I vis­it­ed Hen­ry Moore.

(From a let­ter to Wolf­gang Ker­mer, dat­ed Decem­ber 12, 1987, quot­ed from Ker­mer 1992, p. 182)