Lot 207 Dα

Although it was created in the context of his lanterns, Willi Baumeister's “Figuration mit Laterne” seems to belong to the tradition of his earlier reliefs and wall paintings in terms of its composition. It is an exceptional work that certainly occupies a special position - together with his piece “Graues Fragment (Zwei Laternen)” (Beye/F. Baumeister 2019) - alongside three lantern pictures from 1955, the final year of the artist's life. As is so often the case, viewers are faced with the question of the lantern symbol's meaning - a question to which Will Grohmann also turns his attention at the end of his monograph: “What could Baumeister have meant with his 'Laternen'? […] There are cheerful lanterns, like those from Klee's 'Laternenfest', where children march with their lanterns through the twilight of a summer evening, but there are also all soul's lanterns, like those in the temple district of Nara, the ancient Japanese imperial city: lamps for the dead, which shine once a year. Are these meant? In art, multidimensionality relates not just to space and time, but also to our dreams of the world and eternity. Which of these worlds might Baumeister have been thinking of? […] In one and the same series very different emotions, but also insights, resonate among unchanging basic forms. A slight shift of emphasis can transform everything into its opposite: a different yellow in the background, a different red on blue is already enough to shift between these planes. It is not that Baumeister knew this as he approached the boundary between here and there, and that he consciously conducted the orchestra of his inventions and poetic powers. As always, he trusted in the harmony between the inner and outer world and no longer needed to worry about his arrival in the realm of the universal soul.” (Will Grohmann, Willi Baumeister, Leben und Werk, Cologne 1963, p. 159f.).