Baumeister, Willi

Willi Baumeister, Jokkmokmadchen, 1941, collaged after Terpsichore, a painting by Hitler s favourite painter, Adolf Ziegler. 

Willi Baumeister, Mann mit Spitzbart, 1940s, collaged after Ziegler s Gottin der Kunst. 

Willi Baumeister, Der Mann aufdem Kronleuchter, c. 1916, collage and ink on paper. 

Elsewhere, then, material was asserting itself, foregrounding its textural properties, its unintended aspects. The ideas that animated the experiments with coatings and paints stemmed not just from the modernist art practices that were now banned. Willi Baumeister spoke of an automatism of the material that could be regulated fully by consciousness, just as Paul Klee similarly spoke of the life of material. In this, they echoed Romantic natural philosophy and early German chemistry, which likewise had ordained an equality between artist and substance, convinced that substance too possessed a will. 

Arno Breker s Avenger altered by Willi Baumeister. 

See Schlemmer s letter to Willi Baumeister, 2 April 1933, in ibid., p. 309. 

Reproduced in Kurt Herberts, ed., Modulation und Patina Ein Dokument aus dem Wuppertaler Arbeitskreis um Willi Baumeister, Oskar Schlemmer, Franz Krause, 1937-1944 (Stuttgart, 1989), p. 19. 

See Peter Chametsky, Marginal Comments, Opposition Work Willi Baumeister s Confrontation with... 

See Rene Hirner, Anmerkungen zu Willi Baumeisters Hinwendung zum Archaischen, in Willi... 

Oskar Schlemmer died in 1943. Some of the artists resumed their artistic practice, abandoning the scientific-technological context and the collective aspect. Willi Baumeister became a leading representative of German post-war abstraction before his death in 1955. 

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