“the natural/subconscious sphere unfolds automatically, like writing. It contains an essential matter, spontaneity.”

This painting in the Cerruti Collection dates back to the final period of the career of German painter Willi Baumeister. Like many painters active during the period between the two wars, he modernised his formal repertoire to bring it into line with the abstract and Informel experiences of the post-war era. Indeed, during the 1920s and 1930s, the artist had been involved in Le Corbusier’s Ésprit Nouveau experience, pursuing abstract painting with pure geometric shapes set within a mechanical mixture of geometric motifs and stylised human figures, in an attempt to achieve a formal purity of flat hues with clear, simple outlines. However, he also included Surrealist-type features, resulting from his fluid draughtsmanship that evaded a rational and orthogonal composition. These forms of organic allusion, perhaps mindful of the experiments of Jean Arp and Yves Tanguy, were then combined with ridges and other textured motifs that animated the backgrounds of his paintings. His work in this style was presented at Il Milione gallery in Milan in April 1935, as part of a series of exhibitions on rationalist abstraction that also included shows by Osvaldo Licini and Lucio Fontana. Baumeister was part of the programme of exhibitions on international artists planned by Gino and Peppino Ghiringhelli, which included Max Ernst and Fernand Léger in 1932, and Kurt Seligman and Wassily Kandinsky in 1934.¹ 

During the 1950s, all this was translated into a world of shapes with irregular outlines created by a more empirical approach to composition. The very title of the painting refers to the idea of a world of invented floating forms, specifying the leading role of the shape in the form of a red sickle placed in the middle against a green background. Baumeister was deliberately working on the deviation between memory of nature and abstract form, writing a detailed text on the matter in autumn 1952 in the first issue of Wissen und Leben magazine. Here, in particular, he states that “the natural/subconscious sphere unfolds automatically, like writing. It contains an essential matter, spontaneity.”² The artist therefore allowed for the spontaneous development of the painting, constructing the composition through references and balances of forms that fill the same space on the surface, sometimes clashing and sometimes intersecting, crossed through by thin black filaments that, as in the contemporary work of Joan Miró, act like a link in the form of transparent structures overlapping the organic shapes. The artist also warned against an excessively rigid interpretation of the word “abstraction”, believing that no painting could be considered properly “abstract”, that is to say lacking in any mnemonic reference to forms from our experience of the natural world. In that sense, he translated forms originally born out of a kind of action-based automation into shapes morphologically deriving from organic memory, like an invented vision of a microcellular world that refers to a basic grammar of painting and depiction. 

Luca Pietro Nicoletti 

¹ See E. Pontiggia, “Baumeister e il Milione”, in Rovereto 2012, pp. 111-119.

² W. Baumeister, “La natura nell’arte astratta” [1952], republished in Rovereto 2012, pp. 105-106.