Family Portrait

Gustave Baumann

In Baumann’s modernist painting, Family Portrait, the faces of Gus, Jane and Ann relate to kachinas (small carved figures representing a kachina or ancestral spirit). Hard horizontal or vertical lines define the facial features without the need of exact representation. The faces are strong and powerful yet masculine and feminine. Baumann began collecting kachina dolls immediately after settling in the southwest. A 1920 photograph shows Baumann seated at a table in his Santa Fe studio located at 140 Canyon Road and his kachina collection spanned the mantel of his fireplace.

One can trace Baumann’s diversions in abstraction to as early as 1938 when he created his color woodcuts Rain and Potsherds (later known as Night Ceremony). His hard-edge abstract oil on shaped board, Curiosity Killed the Cat, was painted in 1951. In 1952, he created a small abstract sculpture for the farcical exhibition No Savvy Arte! held at the Museum of New Mexico Art Gallery that February. During the mid 1950s, Baumann created his abstract oil Mountain Goats and his oil Excursion to Alpha dates to 1965.

In September 1957, Baumann returned to Germany and visited Munich. He kept a dairy of his exploits and after he visited the Lenbach Galleries his diary entry reads: The Lenbach Galleries have an exhibition small enough to comprehend with reasonable intelligence—Kandinsky, Miro and last but not least Paul Klee. There is something in seeing their works near its home ground, especially when you see its development extending over a period of years. After all, they were intelligent people like all artists try to be. If that led them into new avenues unfamiliar to us, it might be wise or intelligent on our part to look into the matter, especially as there is a cultural lag of about twenty years between Europe and America.