Lot 204 Dα

Approximately the same age, Willi Baumeister and Will Grohmann were bound by a close and long-lasting friendship. After initial encounters in the 1920s, the correspondence between the painter and the critic began at the end of that decade; in 1930/1931 Grohmann's first little monograph on the artist was published with André Malraux in Paris.
Will Grohmann dated the painting “Taucher mit Spiegelung” to 1934. In his 1963 monograph and catalogue raisonné, he thus assigns it to Baumeister's “Sandbilder Vallorta” group of works, regarding their archaic formal idiom he explains: “Vallorta is a village on the eastern Spanish coast with outdoor Mesolithic paintings. The images - the animals and people - are only hand-sized, monochromatic (red, brown or black) on a yellowish or greyish blue ground […]. The figures feature no interior drawing and modelling, like silhouettes.” The works Baumeister created there are “of extreme elegance, although there is nothing there but the desert sand tinted in various tones of yellow and grey and the terse black hieroglyphs, whose gestures are so convincing that no one would doubt their apparent reality. Standing before the originals, we think of stone tablets from the most ancient times and are nonetheless unable to delude ourselves into believing that the engraved figures completely correspond to the feeling of our time.” (Will Grohmann, Willi Baumeister, Leben und Werk, Cologne 1963, p. 71). Current scholarship assumes that our work is more likely to have been created in 1950/1951 in the context of the “Safer” works, which are very similar to the works from Vallorta in the saffron yellow of the layer of sand that covers them and whose close affinity is also emphasized by Grohmann (cf. op. cit., p. 131).