Gustave Baumann: The Artist’s Environment

Gustave Baumann first came to New Mexico in 1918 and has since become one of the most beloved artists and cultural figures in Santa Fe. Best known for his enchanting woodblock prints, Baumann was a prodigious artist and creative who left behind an enormous legacy that also included painting, sculpture, drawing, marionettes, and furniture.

Gustave Baumann: The Artist’s Environment will provide a comprehensive study of Baumann’s artistic output and offer a close look at how he engaged the physical, cultural, and artistic environment in which he worked. Surveying all periods of his artistic career, and organized thematically, this exhibition will critically examine key concepts at play in Baumann’s artwork through a variety of lenses.

The retrospective will pull primarily from the New Mexico Museum of Art’s extensive collection of artwork by Gustave Baumann. The exhibition is organized by common themes present across Baumann’s work, offering a nuanced understanding of the artist and his artwork within a broader cultural, social, and historical context. Some of these lenses include his relationship to southwestern archeology; cross cultural inspirations and specifically from Puebloan and Hispano cultures; the significance of whimsy, humor, and play in his work; modernist aesthetics and movements that informed his style; nature and ecology; florals and still lifes; decorative art, design, and book arts; and his use of genre scenes in cultivating a romantic vision of New Mexico. The exhibition will also examine Baumann’s artistic process, especially in woodblock printmaking from the original sketch to early designs, drawings and preliminary gouache paintings all produced before the design is transferred to the set of carved blocks.