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Willi Baumeister

Erra­tum

Despite care­ful research, we or oth­ers some­times make mis­takes when deal­ing with the work of Willi Baumeis­ter (1889–1955).

To pre­vent these erro­neous attri­bu­tions or state­ments from remain­ing per­ma­nent­ly in cir­cu­la­tion, the Willi Baumeis­ter Foun­da­tion is pub­lish­ing the cor­rec­tion of the incor­rect infor­ma­tion labelled ‘Erra­tum’ here. The ‘Erra­tum’ sec­tion is intend­ed as part of sci­en­tif­ic research.

Old town bill sheet, around 1930

The Alt­stadt invoice sheet, dat­ed around 1930, was pub­lished in the exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue ‘Mod­erne am Main, 1919 — 1933’, of the Muse­um Ange­wandte Kun­st, Frank­furt am Main, 2019, as being by Willi Baumeis­ter.

The typog­ra­phy was prob­a­bly not cre­at­ed by Willi Baumeis­ter, as some of the details are atyp­i­cal.

Per­son­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion on his­tor­i­cal pho­to — with­out Willi Baumeis­ter

Wolf­gang Ker­mer realised ear­ly on that the attri­bu­tion of the per­son in the pho­to had been mis­in­ter­pret­ed. In his ‘Beitrag zur Geschichte der Staatlichen Akademie der Bilden­den Kün­ste Stuttgart (8)’, from 1996, enti­tled ‘Aus Willi Baumeis­ters Tage­büch­ern’ (From Willi Baumeis­ter’s diaries), the pho­to is pub­lished and the attri­bu­tion of the per­sons is cor­rect­ed. From left to right: Her­mann Sten­ner, an unknown per­son (prob­a­bly Karl Bür­ck­le), Oskar Schlem­mer and, seat­ed, Edmund Daniel Kinzinger in front of Schlem­mer’s mur­al ‘Mir­a­cle of the White Nuns’ for the Cologne Werk­bund exhi­bi­tion of 1914. How­ev­er, the incor­rect per­son­al names per­sist, with Willi Baumeis­ter again being list­ed instead of Karl Bür­ck­le on page 269 of the cat­a­logue ‘Oskar Schlem­mer, Visions of a New World’ pub­lished by the Staats­ga­lerie Stuttgart in 2014.

Sup­posed self-por­trait with Jo-Jo

In 2015, Ernest Rathenau Ver­lag pub­lished the book ‘Sig­na­tures of Mod­ernism’ by Joachim Heusinger von Waldegg. On page 289, a small draw­ing, sup­pos­ed­ly by Willi Baumeis­ter, called ‘Self-Por­trait with Jo-Jo’, was pub­lished as illus­tra­tion XI_25. The draw­ing depicts Willi Baumeis­ter, but it is by an unknown artist and is there­fore not a self-por­trait. The sig­na­ture, on the oth­er hand, is by Willi Baumeis­ter. It is unusu­al for Baumeis­ter to sign a sheet where the draw­ing is not by him. How­ev­er, there are a few com­pa­ra­ble exam­ples in the Baumeis­ter archive.
Ernest Rathenau Ver­lag pub­lished an erra­tum online back in 2016 as a result of our infor­ma­tion. On www.virtuelles-kupferstichkabinett.de, how­ev­er, the so-called ‘Self-Por­trait with Jo-Jo’ is still incor­rect­ly attrib­uted to Willi Baumeis­ter.

The draw­ing is in the Her­zog Anton Ulrich-Muse­um, Braun­schweig, and the orig­i­nal was not yet avail­able to the Baumeis­ter archive. Its prove­nance is also unknown to us. The state of research is there­fore not yet com­plete.

Pho­to from the Baumeis­ter archive in the Kun­st­mu­se­um Stuttgart

In the exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue ‘Willi Baumeis­ter Inter­na­tion­al’, 2013 / 2014, shown at the Kun­st­mu­se­um Stuttgart, the Muse­um Küp­persmüh­le für Mod­erne Kun­st, Duis­burg and the Daim­ler Art Col­lec­tion, Haus Huth, Berlin, a typo­graph­i­cal error has been found in a bio­graph­i­cal pho­to pro­vid­ed by the Baumeis­ter Archive at the Kun­st­mu­se­um Stuttgart. On cat­a­logue page 255, the pho­to tak­en by Willi Baumeis­ter of his Swiss artist friends (from right to left) Her­mann Huber, Rein­hold Kündig and Karl Hügin [incor­rect­ly Hei­gin in the cat­a­logue], from 1912, can be seen. The group por­trait was tak­en in Grächen, CH.

The Unknown in Art

Willi Baumeis­ter wrote his book ‘Das Unbekan­nte in der Kun­st’ (The Unknown in Art) in 1943/44. It could only be print­ed in 1947 — Baumeis­ter would not have been able to pub­lish as a so-called degen­er­ate artist dur­ing the Nazi era and there was ini­tial­ly a short­age of paper in the post-war peri­od. The book was (revised) in 1960 and reprint­ed in 1988. In 2013, the Willi Baumeis­ter Foun­da­tion pub­lished a trans­la­tion into Eng­lish, in which the fol­low­ing spelling mis­takes have crept in.

Page 66,fn. 7: sev­er­al — instead of: ever­al

Page 91,fn. 1: imi­ta­tive ren­der­ings — instead of ren­der­ings

Page 103,fn. 3: Yvan — instead of: Iwan

Page 272,fn. 6: Lás­zló — instead of: Las­z­lo

Page 281,fn. 22: 84 — instead of: 80

Page 304,figs. 153,154: Fliegende Blät­ter — instead of: Fliegende Blät­tern

Poster for the Ger­man-Swiss nation­al ath­let­ics com­pe­ti­tion, 1929

In the exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue ‘Mod­erne am Main, 1919–1933’ of the Muse­um of Applied Arts, Frank­furt am Main, 2019, the ‘Poster for the Ger­man-Swiss nation­al ath­let­ics com­pe­ti­tion’, 1929, was pub­lished as sup­pos­ed­ly by Willi Baumeis­ter. How­ev­er, this poster was not designed by Baumeis­ter, but prob­a­bly by a stu­dent who was enrolled at the so-called Städelschule under Baumeis­ter. It is prob­a­bly a fic­ti­tious term paper, i.e. the Ger­man-Swiss ath­let­ics com­pe­ti­tion nev­er took place.