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Lot Essay
When Willi Baumeister died of a heart attack at his easel on 31 August 1955 he was at the height of his powers. The paintings of Baumeister's last decade mark the culmination of a long and remarkable career that more than that of any other German artist of his generation forms a link with the avant-garde in Germany both before and after the Nazi era. These latter years marked the period of Baumeister's finest achievements, achievements which are characterized by the evolution of his Metaphysical Landscape series, developed from 1946 to 1954. As his friend the critic Will Grohman wrote, "Seldom had Baumeister been so lighthearted and playful. In his middle fifties he was experiencing a new adolescence...a cheerful optimism took hold of him and accompanied him almost without a break to the end of his life" (op. cit., p. 108).
The present work lies stylistically somewhere between his Combmark Pictures (1946) and Vital Landscapes (1947), compositions which denote the artist's emergence from the despair of war and the growth of a new confidence. In Horizant orange, Baumeister creates an abstract realm by assembling geometric forms and bands of color across the picture plane, in lieu of figures. The composition has no set boundaries: surrealist figures stretch across the canvas and swaths of color composed of vibrating lines or "comb marks" dance across the composition without any regard to the horizon line. As Grohman states "the contrast between abstraction and animation, law and chance, produces the tension of reason and instinct, mind and matter, metaphysics and physics. The landscape in itself is an allegory...a myth of our times, living autonomous picture, which remains in the flat and relies on pictorial elements nether remembered or preconceived" (ibid., p. 110). It is important to remember that, on the whole, Baumeister, like his former teachers at the Bauhaus, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, was painting with the conscious aim of generating a sense of cosmic mystery and of universality. Through the medium of pure form and color, his art was deliberately intended to hover ambiguously between the realms of the figurative and the abstract.
The present work lies stylistically somewhere between his Combmark Pictures (1946) and Vital Landscapes (1947), compositions which denote the artist's emergence from the despair of war and the growth of a new confidence. In Horizant orange, Baumeister creates an abstract realm by assembling geometric forms and bands of color across the picture plane, in lieu of figures. The composition has no set boundaries: surrealist figures stretch across the canvas and swaths of color composed of vibrating lines or "comb marks" dance across the composition without any regard to the horizon line. As Grohman states "the contrast between abstraction and animation, law and chance, produces the tension of reason and instinct, mind and matter, metaphysics and physics. The landscape in itself is an allegory...a myth of our times, living autonomous picture, which remains in the flat and relies on pictorial elements nether remembered or preconceived" (ibid., p. 110). It is important to remember that, on the whole, Baumeister, like his former teachers at the Bauhaus, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, was painting with the conscious aim of generating a sense of cosmic mystery and of universality. Through the medium of pure form and color, his art was deliberately intended to hover ambiguously between the realms of the figurative and the abstract.