Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Willi Baumeister Catalogue Raisonné being prepared by Mrs Felicitas Baumeister, Stuttgart.
When Willi Baumeister died of a heart attack while working at his easel on 31 August 1955, he was at the height of his powers. The paintings of his last years represent the culmination of a long and remarkable career that unlike that of almost any other German artist of his generation maintained a persistent and continuous growth before, during and after the years of Nazi rule. As his friend and best critic Will Grohmann has written, "During the last years Baumeister was more independent and inventive than ever before. There was not a sign that he was over sixty; indeed his vitality and intellectual activity had increased. He enjoyed being in full possession of his faculties and able to do so as he pleased with the media and techniques he had mastered."
These were the year of Baumeister's greatest series such the Montaru and the Monturi. The present work belongs to the relatively small, but important series of only seven works known as Vitale Landschaften that Baumeister developed from his famous series of Metaphysische Landschaften of the late 1940s.
Vitale Landschaft V, painted in 1954, is one of the last and best of the series and is a reworking of the earlier Vitale Landschaft IV (cat no. 1034) that Baumeister began in 1947 and only finished in 1954. He has deliberately reworked the same forms of Vitale Landschaft IV in the more assured but relatively new style of his more recent Montaru and Flucht der Kontinente pictures. Indeed, in Vitale Landschaft V very little remains from the original Metaphysische Landschaften series at all - only the motif of the comet at the top left of the picture can be traced to those earlier works. The other forms in the painting have developed into those characteristic psychological "blots" on the landscape that Baumeister always maintained represented the human figure although he would not indicate how, or in what way, preferring to leave it to the viewer's imagination.
Although not the last in the series of Vitale Landschaften - Baumeister was to paint two more in 1954 which move even closer to the Montaru and Monturi series - the present painting encapsulates the essence of this remarkable series as a whole and is in many ways its most accomplished and complete statement.
When Willi Baumeister died of a heart attack while working at his easel on 31 August 1955, he was at the height of his powers. The paintings of his last years represent the culmination of a long and remarkable career that unlike that of almost any other German artist of his generation maintained a persistent and continuous growth before, during and after the years of Nazi rule. As his friend and best critic Will Grohmann has written, "During the last years Baumeister was more independent and inventive than ever before. There was not a sign that he was over sixty; indeed his vitality and intellectual activity had increased. He enjoyed being in full possession of his faculties and able to do so as he pleased with the media and techniques he had mastered."
These were the year of Baumeister's greatest series such the Montaru and the Monturi. The present work belongs to the relatively small, but important series of only seven works known as Vitale Landschaften that Baumeister developed from his famous series of Metaphysische Landschaften of the late 1940s.
Vitale Landschaft V, painted in 1954, is one of the last and best of the series and is a reworking of the earlier Vitale Landschaft IV (cat no. 1034) that Baumeister began in 1947 and only finished in 1954. He has deliberately reworked the same forms of Vitale Landschaft IV in the more assured but relatively new style of his more recent Montaru and Flucht der Kontinente pictures. Indeed, in Vitale Landschaft V very little remains from the original Metaphysische Landschaften series at all - only the motif of the comet at the top left of the picture can be traced to those earlier works. The other forms in the painting have developed into those characteristic psychological "blots" on the landscape that Baumeister always maintained represented the human figure although he would not indicate how, or in what way, preferring to leave it to the viewer's imagination.
Although not the last in the series of Vitale Landschaften - Baumeister was to paint two more in 1954 which move even closer to the Montaru and Monturi series - the present painting encapsulates the essence of this remarkable series as a whole and is in many ways its most accomplished and complete statement.