Marionettes Backstage

 

Gustave Baumann

  1881 - 1971 (biography)

1931  

color woodcut 

8 1/16 x 8 3/16" image 

unsigned 

fewer than 50 impressions 

none 

Chamberlain 140; Baumann 120 

cream Zanders with Hand-in-Heart watermark 

unsigned proof 

 

AB3090 

$3,500.00 

These marionettes, which Baumann discovered backstage at the Yale Puppeteers' theater in Los Angeles, are used again in the color woodcut "Teatro Torito" (Chamberlain, cats. 141.1-141.3), slightly reworked but holding the same positions and expressions. He found great inspiration from them. In the descripton of "Marionettes Backstage," Chamberlain quotes Baumann: "With the persistence of a kitten that decides to adopt you, marionettes seem always to have hovered around my studio door waiting for a favorable chance to slip in. While I was still in Nashville, they did get in for a time and diverted my attention long enough to cause several heads of Hoosier character... Marionettes, like actors, are a temperamental lot - they do talk back and scold the puppeteer if strings are not properly placed, but ultimately it becomes a one-sided argument that can be solved by better workmanship." The Yale Puppeteer Theater was established in 1930 in Los Angeles on Olvera Street, the famous Mexican marketplace still active today. The theater wrote of Baumann in its publication The Puppet Show: "The distinguished artist, Gustave Baumann, spent several days at the theater early in the fall. The visit had at least two results: An exquisite wood-block of a back-stage scene which will adorn one of the comin issues of the Colophon; and second, the imminent establishment by Mr. Baumann of a puppet theater in Santa Fe, New Mexico." - p. 381, In a Modern Rendering: The Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann