?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 8,000 - $ 12,000
GUSTAVE BAUMANN Winter Corral.
Color woodcut, circa 1940. 325x325 mm; 12 3/4x12 3/4 inches, full margins. Signed, titled and numbered 21/125 in pencil, lower margin. A very good impression of this extremely scarce color woodcut.
German-born Baumann (1881-1971) began his art career in Chicago at the Art Institute, where he took evening classes and worked daily at a commercial engraving house. This initial exposure to the art world proved influential on Baumann's artistic outlook; he considered himself a craftsman rather than a fine artist, and he took as much joy in the laborious process of carving wood and making prints as he did in conceptualizing his designs. Baumann's woodcut style was steeped in his German heritage, in the chiaroscuro woodcuts of the old masters Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Dürer, rather than inspired by the Japanese color woodcut tradition that was gaining great popularity in America at the time (Acton p. 14).
Before his relocation to New Mexico, Baumann was among a group of artists who vacationed and worked in rural Brown County, Indiana. He also spent time in New York, Provincetown and Wyoming before settling in Santa Fe in 1918. He continually found inspiration among the mountains, desert and people of New Mexico. Baumann aimed to capture the colorful beauty and grandeur of the landscape as well as the traditions of the indigenous people. Rather than work as an outsider, he immersed himself in the community and the local culture, evidenced in his intimate and expressive color woodcuts of the world around him.
