Lot: 280
Willi Baumeister
1889 Stuttgart - 1955 Stuttgart
Scherzo (Scherzo linear). 1950/51.
Oil with synthetic resin and filler on hard fibre board.
Beye/Baumeister 1095. Signed and dated "51" lower left. Signed, dated "1950" and titled on verso. 54 x 64,7 cm (21,2 x 25,4 in).

PROVENANCE: Dr. Gonser, Stuttgart.
Stuttgarter Kunstkabinett, Roman Norbert Ketterer, Stuttgart.
Marlborough Fine Arts, London.
Galerie Gunzenhauser, Munich.
Private collection South Germany.

EXHIBITION: Willi Baumeister, Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne/Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe 1985, p. 18 no. 43.
Willi Baumeister, Akademie der Künste, Berlin 1986, p. 41 no. 48.
Willi Baumeister, Galerie Gunzenhauser, Munich 1986, p. 10 no. 14 (with illustration in colors p. 16).

LITERATURE: Will Grohmann, Willi Baumeister, Leben und Werk, Cologne 1963, catalogue raisonné no. 763, there with title: "Scherzo linear".
Aus den Beständen der Galerie, Galerie Gunzenhauser, Munich 1982, p. 97 (with illustration in colors.).

While serving an apprenticeship in decoration painting, Willi Baumeister also attended evening courses at the Stuttgart Art Academy. He was in Adolf Hölzel’s composition class from 1909 until 1912, where he met Oskar Schlemmer, who would become a Bauhaus painter. Baumeister and Schlemmer would remain lifelong friends. In 1919/20 Willi Baumeister produced his first “Mauerbilder” [“Wall Pictures”], which have a wall-like relief, are made of a mixture of sand and putty and reveal borrowings from the Cubist canon of forms. Those are the pictures that made Baumeister internationally famous. In 1928 the Städelschule in Frankfurt appointed Baumeister director of the class in commercial graphics, typography and textile printing. Proscribed as “degenerate” in the Third Reich, Baumeister was unable to show his work publicly. During the second world war, Baumeister wrote a book, Das Unbekannte in der Kunst [The Unknown in Art ], which was published in 1947.
In the early 1930s Baumeister began to be interested in texturing that lent the ground a loose and lively surface. It would become, as in the present painting, the support for almost linear drawing, that roams schematically over the ground. Primordial material is evoked, a phenomenon that Baumeister bound into many of his work cycles as a basic theme. The title, “Scherzo”, in turn represents the appropriation of a musical term, which makes burlesque qualities resonate and conveys a cheerful weightlessness in the casual color surfaces. Associations with musical tempi often determine works, both of Baumeister’s and of many of his colleagues from the Informel period. Here the primordial is clothed with a deft touch in a burlesque guise and thus deprived of all sensory heaviness. The fine humour informing this composition corresponds to the delicately dance-like manner in which the schematically suggested figures are moving across the composition. It is almost as if they had already filed past Paul Klee.
The post-war era saw Baumeister resume his teaching duties at the Stuttgart Art Academy. His vast œuvre and important theoretical writings make Willi Baumeister one of the most important modern German artists. Subdivided into many groupings of works, his œuvre, which at the outset was still representational, came to represent an abstract language of forms. [KD].

In very good condition. With few tiny retouchings in edges.

EUR: 40.000 - 60.000 REGEL(7%)
US$: 54.560 - 81.840