Willi Baumeister / Rudolf Belling

Willi Baumeister and Rudolf Belling belonged without doubt to the international avant-garde in the 1920s. They exhibited at prominent galleries such as Der Sturm, Alfred Flechtheim, and Kunstsalon Gurlitt, and their work was reviewed in important magazines like Cahiers d’art, Le Corbusier’s L’Esprit Nouveau, and Het Overzicht.
Both artists – Baumeister as a painter and Belling as a sculptor – abandoned the realistic representation of their subject, instead placing a free treatment of form at the center of their work. Thus, they shaped the early path to abstraction and, not the least through their teaching, had a profound influence on Post War generations.
We are celebrating our 35-year presence in Berlin with an outstanding selection of works by two artists whom we have repeatedly featured in major solo and group exhibitions since our opening in 1991 at Fasanenstraße 72.

Rudolf Belling (1886–1972) was a co-founder in 1918 of the Novembergruppe, formed around Walter Gropius, which sought to unite architecture, painting and sculpture. Their decidedly synaesthetic undertone finds its way into Belling’s sculptural work. His first major piece, »Dreiklang« (1919), stands for the unity of the three arts, and demonstrates his efforts to achieve a close interaction of space and form. The sculptor deliberately integrated the surrounding space as a negative form into sculptural creation: »SCULPTURE is the synthesis of form and space! In a perfect work of sculpture, the sculptural form and the spatial form are of equal value« stated Belling in his 1922 essay Skulptur und Raum.
Our selection of works by Rudolf Belling from the early 1920s features three iconic pieces of 20th-century sculpture: »Dreiklang« (1919), »Organische Formen« (1921) und »Skulptur 23« (1923). These were already on display in 1924 at the artist’s major solo exhibition at the Berlin Nationalgalerie, leading to the early acquisition of a wooden version of »Dreiklang« for the museum.
Rudolf Belling is considered a pioneer of modern sculpture and had six works shown in Alfred H. Barr’s famous exhibition Modern German Painting and Sculpture at MOMA, New York, in 1931. In 1933, the National Socialists banned him from practising; his works were removed from public collections, and his sculptures »Dreiklang« and »Kopf in Messing« were publicly denounced in the 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition. 1935, New York, taught at the private Annot Art School, last major solo exhibition of the pre-war era, featuring 35 works at Rockefeller Centre. Moved to Turkey in 1937, teaching at the Fine Arts Academy, Istanbul. From 1949 on, he returned to plastic art and in 1966 moved back to Germany where he lived and worked in Krailling, near Munich. Works by Rudolf Belling are to be found in museum collections worldwide; in 2017, the Berlin Nationalgalerie at Hamburger Bahnhof mounted an extensive retrospective.

Similarly, Willi Baumeister (1889–1955) was an established figure in early modernist art circles. The intense exchange with France and fellow artists such as Fernand Léger, Le Corbusier and Amédée Ozenfant is very important to him, as well as being part of art groups like Cercle et Carré and Abstraction-Création. By the early 1920s, however, he was clearly active within an international network, evident from his participation in El Lissitzky’s publication »Kunst-Ismen« and his presence in exhibitions in Russia, America, Switzerland and Italy.
Willi Baumeister will be presented with a group of works from the 1940s which is labelled »Afrikanische Bilder«, characterised by dark forms on a relief-like white background. In the 1930s, the artist increasingly moved away from the constructivist pictorial conception of the 1920s, developing rather amorphous formations that were condensed into simple pictorial signs. Baumeister’s formal repertoire was partly inspired by his intense interest in ancient texts, myths and prehistoric rock paintings from Spain as well as through the reproductions of African rock paintings by Leo Frobenius' Africa expeditions: »The painter must find the shortest, simplest way of expressing the essential qualities of human beings. (…) The figures acquire the significance of symbols. They have become signs.«
As a technical innovation, Baumeister introduced the use of filling compound, chalk and plaster – as can be seen in the large »Afrikanische Geister« (1949) which is characterised by an archaic shaping of form and a relief-like surface, and which was part of Baumeister’s extensive contribution to the legendary Documenta I.
1928, Professorship at the Frankfurt School of Decorative Arts (nowadays Städelschule). 1933, dismissed from public service, Baumeister returned to Stuttgart. In 1937 his works are removed from German museums, four pictures shown in the Degenerate Art exhibition. In 1938 took part in the counter-exhibition Twentieth Century German Art in London. Political repression made painting virtually impossible for him, thus he concentrated on working on his seminal book Das Unbekannte in der Kunst. 1946, professorship at the Art Academy of Stuttgart. Baumeister was a key link between the avant-garde of the 1920s and the new Post War generation, which was marked by free artistic expression. In 1948 the French press praised him as »le grand peintre allemande«, even more »le Picasso allemand«. Present at the Venice Biennale in 1948 and 1952, 7 works shown at Documenta I in Kassel 1955.

Exhibition in Berlin: April 29, – June 20, 2026

Opening:
Friday, May 1, 6 – 9 pm
Saturday, May 2, 11 am – 6 pm
Sunday, May 3, 11 am – 6 pm