GUSTAVE BAUMANN Nearer to Art [SOLD]

GUSTAVE BAUMANN Nearer to Art

Acton, Krause, Yurtseven

Museum of New Mexico Press

Hardback, first edition, 1993

158 pages, 125 color plates

11" Height x 9-⅜" x 1" Depth

Independent, prolific, and influential, Gustave Baumann was a central figure in American woodcut printmaking in the early 20th century. Known for his vivid, color-rich prints of rural life, Western landscapes, and Native cultures, Baumann developed a distinct style marked by simplicity and elegance. Trained in Chicago and Munich, he began as a commercial illustrator before gaining acclaim for his woodcuts. After time in Indiana, he settled in Santa Fe, where he produced his most iconic work. This award-winning 1993 publication was the first comprehensive collection of his prints and is presented here in its first paperbound edition.

From the Jacket:

GUSTAVE BAUMANN (1881-1971) created color woodcut prints of American rural landscapes and, particularly, Indigenous American experiences that have reserved for him a place among his country's most beloved artists.

Remarkably, this is the first book of his stunning oeuvre, published to coincide with a major retrospective traveling exhibition of his work.

He began his career in a commercial arts studio in Chicago, plying his trade in the era before photoreproduction replaced wood engraving. At night, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, as he put it, "to get nearer to art." A brief period of study in Munich (1905) refined the fundamentals of his artistic direction, and there he created the first woodcuts in a medium that would bring him international recognition.

He possessed the hand of a craftsman and an artist's heart, a blending of sensibilities that, to a large degree, measured his success. In the bucolic rural summer community of Nashville, in Brown County, Indiana, Baumann made scenes of purity, beauty, and ease that spoke of an innocence in America and declared, quietly, some of her finer qualities. In New York and Provincetown, where the always restless artist wandered, he widened his circle of artistic associations to include printmakers Ethel Mars, L.O. Griffith, and B.J.O. Nordfeldt. On the advice of fellow artist Walter Ufer, Baumann traveled to Taos, New Mexico, in the spring of 1918. It was his longest American trip, and it brought him home.

Baumann lived in Santa Fe for more than fifty years, with side trips to the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Coast, and countless locales in his beloved New Mexico, carving into wood Southwestern landscapes, ancient Indian petroglyphs, scenes of traditional Pueblo life, and spring and summer gardens and orchards that are so immediately recognizable that one is tempted to say one knows not only the places but the artist himself.

He was equally at home in the magnificence of the West and in its most retiring, shaded afternoons. His prints are awash in brilliant, hand-ground pigments — simple and elegant studies rooted in a rural, wholesome America that manages to be both delicate and rugged, personal and mythic.