WILLI BAUMEISTER (1889-1955)

‘The figural element is missing. There is not a sign of people; the stage is set, the cue has been given, but man does not appear. It seems as if he feared the very fact of man’s existence - no matter if merely make-believe - would distrub the absoluteness of the gaiety, the metaphysics of the landscape … Baumeister has replaced the figures with pure, geometrical forms - segments of circles, ellipses, conical sections - and pure colours - blue, yellow, red. And, as in that picture, the contrast between abstraction and animation, law and chance, produces the tension of reason and instinct, mind and matter, metaphysics and physics. The landscape is itself an allegory (...), a myth of our times, living not in the past but in the future’
(W. Grohmann, Willi Baumeister, Life and Work, London, 1961, p. 110).