Paintings, graphic art / Живопись, графика
Famous artists / Знаменитые художники, Willi Baumeister
From 1905 to 1907 Willi Baumeister completed a training in painting and decorating, which was likely the source of his lifelong sense of a fitting use of materials, and his enjoyment of experiment. Admitted in 1906 to the drawing class at the Akademie der bilden den Kunste, Stuttgart, he became a student in Adolf Hö1zel's composition class there in 1910. "In 1919-1920," Baumeister noted, "I made paintings conceived for an architecture that did not yet exist at the time. In contrast to Archipenko, I strove not for an isolated, colored relief but began with a component of architecture, the wall. The result was paintings with actual, raised surfaces, which, as it were, hesitatingly grew out of the wall, without controverting its laws... I called these pictures 'wall paintings,' to emphasize the contrast with 'easel paintings'." Many of Baumeister's wall paintings contain rough-textured passages obtained by adding sand to the paint, a technique he would continue to use a11 the way down to the late Monturi pictures. Color and form were treated in accordance with the law of perfect harmony and clarity, for Baumeister's intent was to expunge all subjectivity from his art. In the early 1930s he recurred to archaic configurations, which lent his style reminiscences of neolithic cave painting. "Monturi Discus I A, from the Monturi sequence, is a work from the artist's final years. Focus of the composition is the circular, white form in the center - the discus of the title - surrounded and intersected by multicolored arabesques, which seems to converge on an expansive, rock-like shape. According to Baumeister's statements, images of this kind address the fundamental issues of life, through symbols of the female principle and the forces at work in nature.
