Ruth Baumgarte

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Ruth Baumgarte (1985)

Ruth Baumgarte (born June 27, 1923 in Coburg ; † February 7, 2013 in Bielefeld ) was a German painter and gallery owner .

Life

Ruth Baumgarte was born as the daughter of Margarethe Kellner-Conrady and Kurt Rupli in Coburg and grew up with her mother in Berlin-Tiergarten and later in the Berlin suburb of Karlshorst. She received her first artistic training from Emmy Stalmann at the Kunstschule des Westens, Berlin.

From 1941 to 1944 she studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Berlin with Kurt Wehlte, among others, and received several awards for her special talent. During her studies, she covertly dealt with the representation of the persecution and deportation of Roma and Sinti as well as the Jewish population and was a permanent employee of the Kaskeline animation studio , the only remaining Jewish film studio that was made for the Nazis in Walt Disney style worked. As a result of the evacuation of the university during World War II , she moved to the Sonneberg State Industrial and Applied Arts School in Thuringia in March 1944 . First she became a press illustrator for the first German-Russian daily newspaper. Because of her first marriage to an artist from Bielefeld, she moved to West Germany.

Up-to-date she drew for the Bielefeld Free Press and worked as a book illustrator. Since the late 1940s she worked in the field of fine art. In 1952 she married the industrialist Hans Baumgarte (died 1999). After 1985 she became internationally known, mainly for her Africa cycle.

In 1986 she co-founded the Samuelis Baumgarte Gallery , which is now run by her son Alexander Baumgarte.

plant

Ruth Baumgarte in the studio, 1989

In total, her work includes over 1100 drawings, 700 watercolors and 50 oil paintings. With watercolor painting in particular, she captured numerous travel impressions and socio-political topics.

She created numerous portraits and stage compositions of actors, dancers and artists. Gestures and habitus of people in their personal environment, processing of personal experiences, socio-political issues such as the representation of people in heavy industry as well as impressions from their travels were her topics. She has also received orders from book publishers to design fiction, children's and youth literature.

Through her marriage to Hans Baumgarte, owner of an ironworks, she came into contact with the steel industry and was one of the few women in art history to portray people in the context of industrial production.

From the 1970s onwards, Ruth Baumgarte repeatedly investigated the radical changes in the relationship between the individual and society. With her series of portraits of the “non-sedentary”, she dedicated her own 7-part series of images with character studies to the great social imbalance in West Germany in the 1980s. In this context, milieu studies were also created around 1985 in which she looked at the various forms of expression in youth culture and reinterpreted them.

Africa cycle

Ruth Baumgarte with the Maasai in the 1990s

For the work from the Africa cycle, Ruth Baumgarte first traveled to numerous African countries in the 1950s and since the early 1980s. Large-format oil paintings emerged from her travel notes, which dealt with African tribal culture and the increasing industrialization and destruction of African rites. In an expressionist style, these pictures show people in front of blending landscape visions.

Exhibitions (selection)

Ruth Baumgarte Art Foundation

In the spring of 2012 Baumgarte founded the Ruth Baumgarte Art Foundation to promote and manage her life's work as an artist. Her son Alexander Baumgarte holds the chairmanship of the foundation for life. Since 2014, the foundation has been awarding the Ruth Baumgarte art prize, endowed with € 20,000, to a figurative artist. Since then, the award winners have been Judith Hopf , Kader Attia , Amelie von Wulffen , Mona Hatoum and Nan Goldin .

literature

  • General artist lexicon International artist database deGruyter online
  • District Office Lichtenberg zu Berlin (ed.), Martin Fenner: Ruth Baumgarte. Origin / coinage / caesura. Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-9818840-0-5 .
  • Kurt Bütow: European artist lexicon. Painting and drawing art. Volume 1. Bavaria Kunstverlag, Königsbrunn 1995.
  • Michael Dückershoff (Ed.): Ruth Baumgarte and the economic miracle. Color frenzy on the boiler. Wienand Verlag, Cologne 2018, ISBN 978-3-86832-435-8 .
  • Frost & Reed, Ltd. (Ed.): Ruth Baumgarte. Paintings & Works on Paper. London 1992
  • Peter Joch (Ed.): Ruth Baumgarte. Vision Africa. Turn of the Fire. Petersberg 2019, ISBN 978-3-7319-0816-6 .
  • Evgenia Petrova (Ed.): Ruth Baumgarte. Palace Editions, St. Petersburg 2018, ISBN 978-3-906917-21-4 .
  • Municipal art collections Salzgitter (Ed.): Ruth Baumgarte. Color frenzy on the boiler. Salzgitter 2015, ISBN 978-3-9816004-5-2 .
  • Jens Stöcker, Jens (Ed.): Ruth Baumgarte. Like through an open window. A retrospective. Munich 2020.
  • Susan Aberbach Fine Art (Ed.): Ruth Baumgarte. African Visions. New York 2001.

Web links

Commons : Ruth Baumgarte  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See class lists of the State University of Fine Arts from WS 1939/40 - WS 1943/44 in the archive of the Berlin University of the Arts.
  2. ↑ See Thuringian State Archive Meiningen, Engineering School for Toy Design and Mechanical Engineering Sonneberg, No. 1027
  3. ↑ Martin Fenner: The silver light shines on every stone . In: District Office Lichtenberg zu Berlin / Martin Fenner (Ed.): Ruth Baumgarte. Origin / coinage / caesura . Berlin 2017, ISBN 978-3-9818840-0-5 , pp. 13-32 .
  4. ↑ See also: Archived copy ( Memento from July 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ See Bielefeld City Archives, magazine inventory, Freie Presse June 29, 1949 - February 22, 1953.
  6. ↑ Cf. u. a. MM Schwarz: No one keeps the track. Schlösser-Verlag, Braunschweig 1954; Kurt Knaak : Good, my pasture fellow! Schmidt-Verlag, Bielefeld 1954; Marei Hoppe: Bille, the fried fish. Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 1955; Berte Bratt : Daring - won. Schmidt-Verlag, Bielefeld 1956.
  7. ↑ Sandra Mühlenberend: Ruth Baumgarte. Pictures of reconstruction and expansion . In: Michael Dückershoff (Ed.): Ruth Baumgarte and the economic miracle. Color frenzy on the boiler . Wienand Verlag, Cologne 2018, p. 9-19 .
  8. ↑ Cf. Gerhard Charles Rump: With time, over time. Ruth Baumgarte and the Development of Western Art. In: Samuelis Baumgarte Gallery (ed.): Ruth Baumgarte. Homage to the 90th birthday, important works from seven decades. Bielefeld 2013, p. 8f.
  9. ↑ Beate Reifenscheid: "Nowhere would I like to be better than Africa" . In: Beate Reifenscheid (ed.): Ruth Baumgarte. Turn of the Fire . Prestel Verlag, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-7913-5703-4 , pp. 11-12 .
  10. ↑ Bianca Strauss: Between remembering and forgetting. Re-animation and memory culture in Ruth Baumgarte's Africa work . In: Peter Joch (Ed.): Ruth Baumgarte. Vision Africa. Turn of the Fire . Michael Imhof Verlag, Petersberg 2019, ISBN 978-3-7319-0816-6 , pp. 16-21 .
  11. ↑ Manfred Strecker: Africa given soul. The Bielefeld painter Ruth Baumgarte is 80 years old today. Ed .: Neue Westfälische . Local culture. Friday June 27, 2003.
  12. ^ Website of the Ruth Baumgarte Art Foundation
  13. ↑ Art Prize on the Foundation's website; accessed November 24, 2016.
  14. ↑ First choice. In: Neue Westfälische, 17./18. January 2015, p. 11.
  15. ↑ Berlin-based cadre Attia receives Baumgarte Art Prize. In: Berliner Zeitung , June 4, 2016, p. 11.
  16. ↑ Amelie von Wulffen receives Baumgarte Prize. In: Neue Westfälische, 4./5. February 2017, Local Culture.
  17. ↑ "We live in dangerous times". In: taz.de. July 9, 2019, accessed August 29, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Baumgarte, Ruth
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and gallery owner
DATE OF BIRTH June 27, 1923
PLACE OF BIRTH Coburg
DATE OF DEATH February 7, 2013
Place of death Bielefeld