Meadowlark Gallery: The Artist Biographies

Gustave Baumann (1881-1971)
Gustave Baumann was born in Magdeburg, Germany in 1881 and died in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1971. He was a Santa Fe painter of Indian figures and landscapes, a woodblock printmaker, a woodcarver, and a writer. Baumann was brought to Chicago with his family in 1891. He studied drawing and printmaking at the Kunstgewerbe Schule in Munich and then at the Art Institute of Chicago. After moving to Indiana, he designed, cut, and printed woodblocks illustrative of Indiana authors. By 1915, he was exhibiting nationally and in Paris. He won the printmaking award at the San Francisco Exposition. After a few years of pampering his "wanderlust," he settled in Santa Fe in 1918, and became one of the colony's founders along with John Sloan, Randall Davey, and Fremont Ellis. Continuing as a rare worker in woodblocks, he also painted in bright colors. His paintings were sometimes for fun, a "Deer Dance" showed the dancers as the animals and "Pasa Tiempo" as a kachina ceremony with dolls dancing. After 1931, he worked with the Marionette Theater, carving his own "little people." Baumann wrote and illustrated "Frijoles Canyon Pictographs" selected as one of fifty books of the year in 1940. His woodcuts were his own version of the sacred Indian pictographs of northern New Mexico. Baumann also carved church figures, saying, "If a man had to harp on one string, he'd go flat."
View high resolution images of works by Gustave Baumann when available.