Willi Baumeister
Läuferin II, 1925

Alfred Flechtheim and Willi Baumeister

The painter, graphic artist and stage-designer Willi Baumeister is an internationally acknowledged representative of classical Modernism as well as an influential academy teacher and theoretician. In late 1932 the Galerie Cassirer in Berlin exhibited his work for the last time in Germany until 1945. In 1933 Baumeister was dismissed from his teaching position and, from then on, was among those artists attacked and ostracised by the National Socialists. In the course of 1937 a total of 134 works by Willi Baumeister were removed from German museums. In 1938 the artist had part of his œuvre stored in Switzerland to protect it from being seized by the Nazis. From 1941 onwards Baumeister was prohibited by the Reichskammer der Bildenden Künste from painting and exhibiting.

In early 1922, Willi Baumeister took part in the first Stuttgart Werkbundausstellung and exhibited in Herwarth Walden’s gallery ‘Der Sturm’. In 1927 works of his were shown in Paris at the Galerie d’Art Contemporain, although he did not sell any. The Galerie Flechtheim and Baumeister worked together on the occasion of his solo exhibition in 1929 in Berlin and Düsseldorf, although no exclusive agreement was made. Flechtheim in Düsseldorf tried to arrange the sale of works by Baumeister to Walter Cohen for the Vereinigung für junge Kunst and through Curt Valentin in Berlin, as well as to Ludwig Justi at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the Stuttgart businessman and collector Hugo Borst and the Krefeld silk manufacturer Hermann Lange.

Both Valentin and Flechtheim were successful: "Drei Figuren mit Landschaft auf Blau" of 1928 was sold for 900 Reichsmarks to Borst; Lange bought a “work entirely composed of circles and angles for his hall”, as Max Osborn reported in the Vossische Zeitung on 15 February 1929 and "Stehende mit Badetuch" of 1929 went to the Vereinigung für junge Kunst. The Galerie Kahnweiler in Frankfurt exhibited works by Baumeister in November 1929 and Georg Swarzenski bought a work directly from the artist’s studio dated 1929.