Lot 206 Dα

Will Grohmann classified the present piece among the group of Baumeister's works known as “Linienmauer, Ritzlinien, plastische und andere Linien”, which occupied the painter from the early 1940s to the beginning of the 1950s. These works are united by an unmistakably archaic and mystical formal idiom, which is also reflected by the artist's choice of titles, such as “Afrika”, “Sumer” and “Mykene”. “Baumeister's designs become more and more interwoven”, writes Will Grohmann of Baumeister's works during the 1940s, “it becomes more and more clear that the painter is no longer thinking in terms of themes, but from the foundation of his abundant artistic inventions and experiences, which provide direction to a feeling or a deeper layer of his consciousness. Everything is a mask, every figure is ambiguous, the medium of a truth that does not allow itself to be directly grasped and comprehended. […] Working from within this situation, Baumeister experienced the way of the artist doubly as a way into the unknown, as a voyage of discovery to a destination which was unknown to him, which he would only know when he had reached that destination. This intersects with Klee's assertion that the artist does know everything, but only afterwards.” (Will Grohmann, Willi Baumeister, Leben und Werk, Cologne 1963, p. 97f.). Baumeister's scratched figures seem to come from the past, but they nonetheless contain the present as well as the future.