Provenance:
Max Peiffer Watenphul
La Medusa, Studio d’Arte, Rome
Galleria Lorenzelli, Milan
Private collection
Private collection, Germany
Exhibitions:
Mostra di Arte Tedesca, Rome, La Medusa, Studio d’Arte Contemporanea 1959
Willi Baumeister, Milan, Galleria Lorenzelli 1963
Willi Baumeister – Paul Klee, Kochel, Franz-Marc Museum 04.10.2015 – 10.01.2016
Literature:
La Medusa, Studio d’Arte Contemporanea: Mostra di Arte Tedesca, Exh. cat., Rome 1959, cat. ill. p. 2
Galleria Lorenzelli: Willi Baumeister. Exh. cat., Milan 1963, cat. ill. no. 1
Will Grohmann: Willi Baumeister. Life and Work, Cologne 1963. no. 288, p. 275 (titled: Studie zu Tennisspielern)
Franz-Marc Museum: Willi Baumeister – Paul Klee, Exh. cat., Kochel 04.10.2015 – 10.01.2016, cat. ill.
The tennis player is always on the move. Just as the ball crosses the net, the eye flies from form to form until it fully grasps the composition. The first series of sports paintings, which include our tennis player, mark a turning point in Baumeister’s work. From hard and mechanically connoted constructions and content, softer, seemingly organic forms develop, which relate to one another and create a causality of their own – the artist proceeds with the orderly fragmentation of the pictorial content, meaning that the specific scene often only regains its context through the title. After the First World War, the artist established himself on the German art market and was honoured with a solo exhibition at the renowned Alfred Flechtheim Gallery in 1929, the year in which Skizze zu einem Tennisspieler was created. The previous year, the Baumeister family moved to Frankfurt, as the artist was offered a professorship at the Städelschule.
In Skizze zu einem Tennisspieler (Sketch for a tennis player), distinct tendencies of a clear and structured way of working with circle and ruler are recognisable. Stylised elements of the playing field are placed between the two players with clear strokes and dark colour gradations in individual passages, almost like a collage, to suggest the tennis court and the adjacent space. Using colours and shapes, Willi Baumeister constructs imaginative pictorial sections that only hint at reality yet create clear visual references as you look at them. The lively and symbiotic hustle of the game is clearly recognisable, if nothing else, by the clear relationship that the players have to each other.
Like the sport of tennis itself, the picture is organised in rhythms, gestures and sequences, thus displaying an incredible dynamism and simultaneity – in perpetual motion.
