Sidney and Lois Eskenazi Museum of Art

About this Work

A leading modernist artist in Weimar Germany, Willi Baumeister was dismissed from his professorship at the art academy in Frankfurt when the Nazis came to power in 1933, and had to support himself by working in a paint factory during the Third Reich. After World War II, Baumeister was appointed professor at the Stuttgart academy, and became a member of Zen 49, a small group of German artists devoted to developing abstraction in the late 1940s. This painting is from his Monturi series, which is characterized by large white forms that contrast with the predominantly black forms of Baumeister’s related Montaru series, suggesting the artist’s interest in evoking contrasts and oppositions in his work.