Distinguished Artist Series
The Life and Art of Karl Baumann
by Lauri Hoffman, Curator
Ever since the mid-1800s, science
had challenged religion, leaving man perplexed and uncertain as to the significance
of his existence on earth. Darwin's "Origin of the Species" (1859)
introduced a theory of evolution through natural selection, undermining
the existence of God as designer of the Universe. Discoveries in space had
expanded the Universe, plucking the tiny earth from the center and tossing
it into the midst of infinite planets and stars. In the work place, man's
once valued skills were replaced by machinery and man was reduced to an
interchangeable part.
Anxiety, fear, and desperation forced man to examine old values and search for new. Baumann's industrial scenes of the 1940s and 1950s illustrate the twentieth century mentality. His painting of a factory interior (Untitled, 1954), shows no human contact. Men relate not with each other but with a specific part of the machine. Dark blues, greys, and browns fail to distinguish man from metal. Devoid of facial features, man has been stripped of his identity. "Attrified" brains make sense of the tiny heads; machine dictates and man responds. Standing rigid and angular, these figures have clearly been reduced to replaceable parts of the larger mechanical structure.
Loneliness pervades in Baumann's city scenes. In "San Francisco Morning, " c. 1952 , strong colors and jagged forms dictate the dynamic nature of the growing city where houses pop out of the green hillside and clutter together in a claustrophobic manner. Faceless figures stand confined within the restraints of the thick black line that defines their shape, magnifying the autonomy of the individual in the midst of an exploding population.
The situation of modern man is summarized in "3rd
Street Warehouses," 1948. Large buildings and mechanical structures
reach into the evening sky. Colors and forms swim together in a wild medley,
bringing about a dizzy, visual frenzy. The composition is divided into four
sections which simultaneously present various views and reorganize parts
into a new whole. The Cubist painters used this notion of simultaneity to
reveal various planes of an object in a two-dimensional space, achieving
a new order. Here, the same concept is transferred to modern technology,
which made it possible to communicate with distant places and different
time zones in any given moment.
As Baumann wrote, "Our world is getting smaller. Any discovery or line of thinking can be heard or seen in minutes." The crescent moon in the left center panel of "3rd Street Warehouses" and the setting moon in the neighboring panel are connected by electrical cables that stretch across the sky to suggest communication between two time zones. The radar tower and the transmission signals that emerge from the submarine acknowledge this world-wide communication network, In the midst of this man-made world, where screaming cities emerge from slaughtered woods and concrete and metal replace soil and trees, a tiny silhouetted figure stands desperate, in search of meaning.
Above Left: Untitled (Pine Trees), 1939, watercolor, 30 1/2 x 23 inches; Above Right: Untitled (Still-Life), 1949, oil on canvas, 16 x 21 3/4 inches
This page was originally published in Resource Library Magazine. Please see Resource Library's Overview section for more information. rev. 10/28/11
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