Monster Sturm New York

RUDOLF BAUER:
A NON-OBJECTIVE POINT OF VIEW

A BIOGRAPHIC ESSAY

Early in the twentieth century in Berlin, a German caricaturist and political cartoonist named Rudolf Bauer began to make his mark. While Bauer's illustrations delighted his audience and paid the bills, it was his avant-garde experiments in Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism that stirred his soul. Bauer caught the attention of Herwarth Walden, founder of the famed Galerie Der Sturm in Berlin, who mounted three solo shows of Bauer's paintings amid exhibitions of works by Marc Chagall, Vasily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, and other modernist luminaries.

In America Bauer's work was introduced to the American public in the early 1920s through the legendary Societe Anonyme. Bauer's work was featured in the exhibition bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, as early as 1933. Solomon R. Guggenheim became Bauer's champion and patron and purchased more than three hundred works for his collection. A 1937 article in Time magazine cites a Bauer painting as Guggenheim's favorite and pictures the copper magnate sitting proudly in front of it. Guggenheim established a foundation for Non-Objective painting and committed to the construction of the now-famous museum on Fifth Avenue, efforts that can be argued were the direct result of Bauer's ideas.

Bauer's work The Holy One (1936) was the inspiration for the main attraction at the 1939 World's Fair, the Trylon and Perisphere buildings. Art historian Robert Rosenblum has also noted the striking similarity of Bauer's Blue Triangle (1934) to Barnett Newman's Abstract Expressionist sculpture Broken Obelisk (1963-69), one of the centerpieces of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. The curator and art historian William Moritz has noted that "Bauer's work during the thirties and forties . . . was very much seen and quite influential, so no responsible history of abstract art can fail to discuss his work." Why then have the name Rudolf Bauer and his work disappeared into near oblivion? Was his erasure from the annals of art history intentional and malevolent? These are the questions that continue to stir debate, as the art world begins to rediscover the work of this visionary artist.