Lot 289 D

Listed under the singular pictures in the catalogue raisonnés of his work, Baumeister's painting “Maler und Modell” occupies a solitary position, and it cannot be grouped with any of his series in terms of motif or style. Although individual elements, such as the palette or the ovoid forms, can already be found in earlier works, the composition is new. The pictorial space is divided into a black and a white section, forming the backdrop for figures set on pedestals like sculptures: the painter on the left and the model on the right are additionally set off against the colour of a nimbus-like form. The palette and easel serve as a unifying link and oscillate between surface and space. The painted surface, already applied in a dry consistency as it is, also alternates between smooth passages and coarse ones done with a palette knife. A symbol-like quality and the character of the paint produce allusions to prehistoric wall paintings. In the early 1930s Baumeister had attended a lecture on the Cave of Altamira, and he was also able to pursue this interest and to research ancient painting techniques after he began working for the Wuppertal paint manufacturer Kurt Herberts in 1936. Herberts provided artists such as Oskar Schlemmer and Willi Baumeister, who was forbidden from exhibiting his work in Germany from 1941, with the opportunity to continue their artistic work. Baumeister's predilection for ancient artefacts also found expression in his own collection of early non-European and Greek artworks and utilitarian objects. Regarding the establishing of the forms in our painting, “Maler und Modell”, a small Osiris figure and a Cycladic idol which had both been in Baumeister's collection since 1940 seem particularly interesting (see comparative illus.). “the ancient art I love is the art of the egyptians, […] the very early art of the greeks and the very oldest art of the stone age”, explains the painter in a letter of 1938 (cited in exhib. cat., Willi Baumeister: Figuren und Zeichen, Hamburg/Münster/Wuppertal 2005/2006, p. 192). Baumeister admired “all art before Greek Classicism”, on account of its “sensibility for surface […], the head in profile, the eye from the front, the shoulders from the front, belt and buttocks from the side” (cited in ibid.).