Artist Gustave Baumann (American, 1881–1971)
Title Desert Rock Garden
Date 1951, printed 1952
Medium Color woodcut on paper
Dimensions Framed: 20 1/4 × 25 × 1 1/4 in. (51.4 × 63.5 × 3.2 cm)
Image (sight): 10 × 15 in. (25.4 × 38.1 cm)
Sheet: 14 3/8 × 18 1/8 in. (36.5 × 46 cm)
Credit Line Gift of Annemarie Mahler, Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University
Accession Number 2010.101
About this Work
In 1918 Gustave Baumann moved to New Mexico (first to Taos and then to Santa Fe). Although he'd lived in the Midwest for most of his life, the warm weather and the spirit of the burgeoning southwesten arts community proved to be powerful lures. The region also provided new visual stimuli--from its grand canyons and cacti to Native American petroglyphs and traditional adobe architecture--while the sun-soaked environment inspired a new supersaturated color sense.
Stylistically, Baumann's southwestern works favor a flattened all-over decorative pattern and a heightened use of cross-hatched, mesh-like lines to add texture and visual interest. Elements such as his characteristic dotted border and hand-in-heart stamp also became standard features. Baumann's shift from pictorial realism towards greater abstraction and simplicity in some of his later prints associated these works with Modernism. In this image, the white sand and black lava create broad, horizontal bands of color, while the central rock formations suggest mysterious, otherworldy "desert creatures."
