Willi Baumeister

🔳Willi Baumeister (22 January 1889 – 31 August 1955) was a German painter, scenic designer, art professor, and typographer.

Baumeister took part in his first exhibition in 1910, showing figurative works inspired by impressionism. His chief interest was even at this time already in cubism and Paul Cézanne.

These influences of impressionism and cubism that shaped Baumeister’s early paintings played an essential role in his work until the end of the 1920s. 

Although one still finds figurative elements in his paintings, the forms grew increasingly geometric and took on a dynamic of their own, and Baumeister broke the traditional connection between form and color. 

As Baumeister focused increasingly on abstraction, he was alienated from the artistic program of the Third Reich, which promoted heroic ideals of Germany’s past through representational work influenced by classical art. In 1937, Baumeister’s paintings, along with the work by his longtime friend Schlemmer, were included in the notorious “Degenerate Art” exhibition, and a ban on his art was instituted in 1941.

During World War II, Baumeister studied prehistoric and Asian art, gleaning ideas and themes which he used in his later works. Today, his art can be found in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. On August 31, 1955, Baumeister died while working at his easel in Stuttgart, Germany.