Rudolf Bauer (artist)

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Rudolf Bauer (born February 11, 1889 in Lindenwald , Wirsitz district , Posen province , Kingdom of Prussia ; † November 28, 1953 in Deal , New Jersey , United States ) was a German abstract artist who spent the last decades of his life in the USA spent.

Life

Bauer's family moved to Berlin when he was young . He developed his artistic skills as a teenager. Later, against his father's resistance, he attended the Royal Academy of Arts in Berlin. He made a living doing illustrations and caricatures for various magazines and newspapers. In 1912 his style changed to the abstract.

In the same year, 1912, farmer met Herwarth Walden , who shortly before had founded the magazine Der Sturm . Bauer was actively involved in the magazine and gallery Der Sturm until 1921. Bauer exhibited his first works in the Sturm Gallery in 1915, and his first solo exhibition there in 1917 with 120 lyrical, abstract works. Two further exhibitions followed in 1919 and 1920. The group of Sturm artists included Wassily Kandinsky , Marc Chagall , Paul Klee , Otto Nebel and, up to his early death in war, Franz Marc .

In 1917, Bauer met Freiin Hilla von Rebay (von Ehrenwiesen). In 1918 he was a founding member of the November group in Berlin and in 1920 of the artist group Der Krater . Rebay and Bauer got to know each other better and in 1919 they shared a studio. The Rebay family was against this association. Rebay then made a tour of Italy. There was still an exchange of letters between the two, but they became estranged.

First contacts in the USA

1920 visited Katherine Sophie Dreier , previously together with Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray , the Société Anonyme Inc. was founded in Berlin and bought several works Bauer, including the painting Andante V , which today (2013) in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven (Connecticut) depends.

Bauer stayed in Berlin and set up his own museum for abstract art in Berlin-Charlottenburg , which he called Das Geistreich . In 1927 Rebay traveled to the USA and portrayed the copper industrialist Solomon R. Guggenheim there . During this time she was able to show Guggenheim some works of non-representational art by Kandinsky and Bauer. His decision to collect this art arose during this time. Guggenheim and his wife traveled to Germany with Rebay in 1930 to meet Kandinsky and Bauer. During this time, Bauer's style had changed to geometric abstraction , which would determine his work in the future. Guggenheim bought some of Bauer's works. Bauer used the proceeds for further exhibitions in his museum.

Salomon R. Guggenheim Collection

The collection of the magnate Guggenheim was first shown in March 1936 in the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston (South Carolina) and then went on, for example, to the Arts Club of Chicago. Bauer had traveled to the USA for the opening of the exhibition and did not return to Germany until 1938 . In the meantime his works had been shown in the exhibition "Degenerate Art" . After his return, Bauer was arrested by the Gestapo and charged with foreign currency offenses because of the sale of some paintings to the "Jews" (Guggenheim) abroad and the purchase of works of art from the proceeds. He was only released a few months later and prepared for his departure to the USA, which he succeeded in July 1939.

Further life in the United States

Shortly before Bauer's arrival in New York, the Museum of Non-Objective Painting had opened there at 24 East 54th Street in Manhattan . The opening exhibition, entitled The Art of Tomorrow , also featured Bauer's painting Orange Accent . For the first few months, Bauer lived in Manhattan with Rebay, who had become executive director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation before moving to one of the Guggenheim-owned houses in Deal on the Atlantic coast of New Jersey.

In Deal, Bauer signed a contract with Guggenheim in which he sold 110 paintings to Guggenheim. Allegedly, Bauer's language skills were not enough to read the contract correctly: The $ 500,000 mentioned in the contract were not paid out in one sum, but as an annuity according to the contract, whereby all future works were to become the property of the Foundation. Bauer was so shocked by this connection of his life and his works to the Foundation that he stopped painting from then on. His relationship with Rebay also suffered from these conditions. In 1944, Bauer married his housekeeper Louise Huber. He died of lung cancer in 1953.

aftermath

Guggenheim died in 1949, Rebay lost her influence and had to resign as managing director of the Guggenheim Foundation. The board of directors of the foundation broke new ground, among other things away from the non-objective art , so that Bauer's work was housed in the magazines for the time being. It was not until 1967 that some of his works were shown in the Guggenheim Museum in the exhibition Seven Decades, A Selection . In 2005 the exhibition Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim was shown both in New York and in Munich at Villa Stuck and Berlin at the Deutsche Guggenheim . In 2007 the Weinstein Gallery , San Francisco , which also represents the estate, showed an excerpt from his work. The Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida received 60 drawings and paintings by Bauer as a gift. In 2014, some of his works were auctioned at Sotheby's in New York and a play about his life was staged in one of the smaller off-Broadway stages.

Exhibitions

  • 1970: Rudolf Bauer 1889–1953. Paintings, graphics. Wiesbaden, Municipal Museum, Picture Gallery.
  • 1971: Rudolf Bauer (1889–1953). Painting from the "storm" period. Galerie Gmurzynska-Bergera, Cologne.
  • 1985: Rudolf Bauer, 1889–1953 . Museum of Modern Art. Museum of the 20th Century , Vienna and Staatliche Kunsthalle Berlin (with catalog: the Museum, Vienna).
  • 2014: Rudolf Bauer. Works on paper . Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco.

Exhibition catalogs

  • Rudolf Bauer, 1889–1953 . Text by Clemens Weiler, Städtisches Museum Wiesbaden, Gemäldegalerie, 1970.
  • Painting from the "storm" period . Galerie Gmurzynska-Bargera, Cologne 1971.
  • Rudolf Bauer. Galerie Gmurzynska, Cologne 1973.
  • Freerk Valentien: Rudolf Bauer. Galerie Valentien, Stuttgart 1973.
  • Rudolf Bauer, 1889–1953. Edited by Susanne Neuburger. Museum of Modern Art / Museum of the 20th Century, Vienna, and State Art Gallery Berlin 1985.
  • Rudolf Bauer . Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, California, USA 2007, ISBN 978-0-9790207-0-4 .
  • Rudolf Bauer. Works on paper . Text by Peter Selz. Weinstein Gallery, San Francisco, California, USA 2010, ISBN 978-0-9790207-1-1 .

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Simon Broll: Forgotten artist Rudolf Bauer. The master who didn't want to paint. on: spiegel.de , September 27, 2014.
  2. ↑ Simon Broll: Forgotten artist Rudolf Bauer. The master who didn't want to paint. on: spiegel.de , September 27, 2014.

literature

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personal data
SURNAME Bauer, Rudolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American painter
DATE OF BIRTH February 11, 1889
PLACE OF BIRTH Lindenwald , Wirsitz district , Posen province , Kingdom of Prussia
DATE OF DEATH November 28, 1953
Place of death Deal (New Jersey) , USA