Eidos Amö

The years immeditately preceding the Second World War were to deeply affect Baumeister's professional and private life. One year before painting the present work, Baumeister had been included in the infamous "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich, thus branding him an outcast in the eyes of National Socialist officialdom. His teaching post at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Frankfurt had been revoked, and thus he returned to his native Stuttgart, increasingly closing himself off from public view. This isolation, however, allowed Baumeister to focus exclusively on his work, creating his celebrated Eidos series (see fig.1). "It is not certain what Baumeister meant by Eidos. This Greek word for "form" may refer to the eternal archetype, of which the things in the visible world are but shadows. The image we see may be the product partly of cosmic experience, partly of the individual experience of a passing instant. But in Baumeister's case what counted in that experience was the archtypal factor. The older he grew the closer he got to the region of the springs that feed man's creative powers, whithout seeking any form." (W. Grohmann, op. cit., p. 64)

Baumeister himself referred to the floating form at the upper edge of the Eidos pictures as an amoeba form, which was constantly changing its shape. In fact, the sub-title of the present work - AMÖ - undoubtedly alludes to the biomorphic shape at the top of this picture. Having read Goethe's "Plant Morphology" and having been impressed by Paul Klee's analysis of microscopic cells, Baumeister was using the building blocks of life as the basis for his investigation into the archetypal, the immutable forces of existence.