Master of the color woodblock, Gustave Baumann (1881‱971) combined traditions of fine and folk art with his German heritage and knowledge of colors to create vivid images of New Mexico and its diverse people. He was also an accomplished oil painter, carver, furniture maker and creator of marionettes.
During a six-decade career in Santa Fe, Baumann won friends for his generous civic contributions and admirers for his innovative achievements in a variety of media. The quality and timeless subject matter of his woodcut prints have given them enduring popularity.
That continuing interest has led to a rotating permanent installation at the New Mexico Museum of Art, “Gustave Baumann: A Santa Fe Legend,” which features selections from the museum’s 1,000 Baumann prints, drawings, paintings and pieces of furniture. It is organized by Joseph Traugott, the museum’s curator of Twentieth Century art and Baumann authority.
The broader show is complemented by a fascinating focused display, “Pulling Strings,” organized by the museum’s chief curator Tim Rodgers. It showcases examples of the 65 marionettes carved and painted by Baumann. He and his wife took them on tour throughout New Mexico for years, acting out Hispanic and Native American folk stories.
Baumann’s “little people” include a self-portrait and representations of his wife and daughter, a variety of Indians in diverse situations, and a group of characters ranging from the Lord Leffinghoop to Pecos Bill to a camera-toting tourist. “The marionettes, so expressive of Baumann’s spirit of whimsy and delight,” said writer Julie Curry, “are alive with that combined sense of humor and horror so integral to the German folk tale.”
Beloved by old and young alike, precise replicas of Baumann’s fragile, original marionettes live on today in the museum’s annual Christmas festivities.
The artist emigrated with his family from Magdeburg, Germany, in 1891, when he was 10 years old. His father soon abandoned his wife and children. At age 16, Gustave worked as an errand boy for an engraving house to help support the family. After work, he attended night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago, honing his drawing skills. By 1903, the 22-year-old was skilled and ambitious enough to become an independent advertising agent.
Having saved enough, in two years he returned to Germany, where he studied at the Arts and Crafts School in Munich, the international hub of block printing. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, this printing technique was highly popular as a means of illustrating literary works and affordably decorating middle-class homes. Baumann adopted the German style of organizing realistic images with large, flat areas of color next to one another, an approach he utilized throughout his career.
Back in Chicago in 1906, his skillfully created woodcut illustrations earned him a living in the city’s high-pressure commercial art world. Baumann resisted Chicago’s Modernist movements, embracing ideals associated with the international Arts and Crafts movement, notably efforts “to empower handmade productions against the perfection and monotony of machine-made goods,” in Traugott’s words. “The movement rejected industrial labor and lauded the individualism of handmade objects that could be used around the house.”
Frank Lloyd Wright and other Chicago architects championed the use of Arts and Crafts fixtures, furniture, pottery, stained-glass windows and artwork in their Prairie School architecture. “Baumann’s woodcut imagery exemplifies the artistic outlooks of this populist trend in the Chicago arts community during this period,” observes Traugott.
Joining the Palette & Chisel Club, a group expressly established to alleviate the drudgery of commercial artwork, he met Victor Higgins and Walter Ufer, who later joined him as stars of the New Mexico art world. In 1915, Baumann won a Gold Medal for printmaking at the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco.
Seeking respite from the grind of commercial work and the bustle of the city, Baumann summered in Brown County in rural Southern Indiana, center of the Hoosier Group of landscape painters, led by Theodore Clement Steele. Baumann’s work there at first sought to capture the region’s fast-disappearing, preindustrial, agricultural ambience. He illustrated James Whitcomb Riley’s nostalgic poems of Indiana’s rural past in what Traugott calls “stiff and labored” images dominated by somber blacks and browns. Nevertheless, they “captivated urban audiences longing for a return to a simpler rural past,” says Traugott.
His friendship with Steele and other Hoosier artists encouraged Baumann to embrace for a while the local landscape tradition; he created numerous watercolors, concerning himself with decorative aspects of nature that would be useful in printmaking. His muted palette gradually gave way to higher key colors.
By the midteens, Baumann began to produce livelier, more colorful woodcuts that presaged his work in the Southwest.
His woodcut “Playroom Symposium,” 1916, features a gaggle of endearing animals in close, colorful proximity.
Sojourns in western New York, Provincetown, Mass., and New York City inspired brightly hued rural and urban scenes. In 1917, he recorded a Childe Hassam-like view of Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue festooned with American flags signaling the US entry into World War I.
In 1918, Baumann’s distaste for Chicago’s commercialism, his search for peace, simplicity and new artistic inspiration and the urging of fellow artists E. Martin Hennings, Higgins and Ufer led him to New Mexico, briefly to Taos before settling in Santa Fe. Joining a burgeoning art community, he was active in local projects and art associations, becoming a central figure in Santa Fe’s cultural community. In the 1930s, he served as regional coordinator of the Public Works of Art project of the Works Progress Administration.
Baumann was married at age 44 to Jane Devereux Henderson, a trained singer and actress. They had one daughter and lived in an adobe house with an iron ornament on the rooftop in the form of a smiley face, designed from the letters of the word “Koshare.” Resembling an Indian pictograph and a self-portrait, it served as a colophon on some of his works. An intriguing sight to this day, it reflects the artist’s sense of playfulness. As art writer Calla Hays once wrote, “Baumann was a delightmaker in the world of art, a thoughtful man with a sense of fun, which often surfaced in the diverse works which flowed from his mind, his heart and his extremely facile hands.”
As in Indiana, Baumann found endless inspiration in the surrounding landscape and local population. His work, which took on an increasingly Modernist look, reflected his keen interest in prehistoric Indian culture, as well as in contemporary Pueblo and Hispanic rituals and ways of life. Observers praised his ability to create atmospheric effects and astute color contrasts in the relatively unyielding woodcut medium.
As one critic noted, “The woodblock art of Baumann is an art of place, with its affectionate, sometimes vibrant, recording of a particular curve in a river’s movement, a particular moment in a perspective of a mountain or desert road, a particular portion of a garden’s growth.” Baumann’s prints sold well to collectors and tourists.
New Mexico transformed Baumann’s color selections. As writer Juliet Curry put it, “His shyness dissolved in the purifying New Mexico sunlight. His color went wild. An electrifying explosion of hot golds, magentas and greens spilled in ecstasy, straight from his heart.” Baumann’s talent breathed new life and joy into a great variety of scenes.
His love of gardens, flowers and trees is documented in such color woodcut prints as “Green Gate Orchard,” 1923, “Grandma Battin’s Garden,” 1927, and “Spring Blossoms,” 1950, each bursting with brilliant colors of the Southwest. Ubiquitous adobe structures come alive in Baumann’s shimmering color woodcut images like “Old Santa Fe” and “Sanctuario †Chimayo,” both 1924, highlighted by broad swatches of golden color. As art curator David Acton observed, Baumann’s “prints succeed in sharing with the viewer something of the comfortable contentment of the artist’s own personality.”
Entranced by activities revolving around Native American architecture and rituals at San Ildefonso Pueblo near Santa Fe, Baumann used small watercolors as preliminary studies for woodblock prints. “Solid brushstrokes of opaque pigments allowed Baumann to transform a scene into a Modernist presentation of flat planes of color that appear like the flat imagery printed from the surface of his woodblocks,” says Traugott. He cites as examples the artist’s tiny (6¾ by 5½ inches) 1920 opaque gouache “San (Santo) Domingo Pueblo,” which was used to develop a small (7¼ by 6 inches) woodcut print of the same title in 1924.
In many ways, Baumann’s most interesting and colorful images record Indian rituals, such as “Corn Dance †Santa Clara,” 1924, with its colorful frieze of hopping figures before a golden background of a cottonwood tree, adobe structures and a towering butte. That same year he created an even more colorful woodcut, “Hopi Katzinas,” in which the figures come alive, interacting with another. It is likely based on his own collection of Pueblo kachina dolls.
When his works went on tour, they gathered rave reviews around the country. One newspaper declared that “Baumann has the happy facility of expressing both realism and fantasy in his wood blocks,” while another praised “an exhibition blazing with color.”
Although best known for his woodcuts, Baumann also did some skillful oil paintings, like “Winter Ceremony †Deer Dance,” 1922, measuring a substantial 29½ by 51¾ inches. It features small dancing figures moving around a flat, heavily textured surface. “Figures, patterns and space are combined with almost magical effect, less insistent on rhythm than on the fantasy element of Indian ceremony,” observes Smithsonian American Art curator William H. Truettner.
In spite of their simple, straightforward appeal, creating color woodcuts involved a laborious process requiring much care and patience. Baumann’s “technique involved numerous carvings, the careful placement of each block and hours at the press,” says art historian Robert R. White. As the artist noted in his unpublished autobiography, the medium “requires& complete disregard for time and considerable patience in waiting; but do not be too unmindful of time, it is the final arbiter in the value of your work.”
Baumann, a talented carver, created a number of pieces of furniture, notably painted wood chairs with straight backs and decorative patterns.
Baumann’s sheer genius in creating color woodcuts, including his keen eye for personal imagery, traditional yet innovative style, exacting techniques and high standards have given his prints lasting, albeit changing appeal. “The great achievement of his career,” says art curator David Acton, “was that he was able to delight people by the melding of his craftsman’s skill with the sustained inspiration he drew from the beauty of nature, the venerable traditions of Native American culture and a prevailing sense of good humor, all of which he discovered and nourished in the American West during the years of his artistic maturity.”
To Twenty-First Century viewers, put off by the impersonality of today’s electronic art, “the handmade qualities of Baumann’s woodcuts speak with new voice to audiences who reject digital works as passionless and seek solace through more personal imagery&His works have become more popular than ever,” asserts curator Traugott.
As Traugott concludes, “Interpretations of Baumann’s imagery have gone through interesting interpretive transformations: from commercial illustrations to contemporary art that was part of the spirited Santa Fe artist community; from nostalgia for preindustrial America to a renewed reverence for Southwesternist genre scenes; and from the yearning for the way things were in the Santa Fe artist community to the veneration of the handmade object in an impersonal digital world. With each of these transformations, audiences have reconceived the meaning of Gustave Baumann’s woodcut prints in the ever-changing context of New Mexico art.”
Further evidence of continuing interest in Baumann’s work is a project to recreate his studio, with his working tools and press, in the historic Press at the Palace of Governors, New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe. It will open in May.
The New Mexico Museum of Art is at 107 West Palace Avenue on the Plaza. For information, 505-476-5072 or www.mfasantafe.org .
