Red Frieze 1952 - 1954

Willi Baumeister made this print, Red Frieze, and though we don’t have a specific date, it’s from the middle of the last century. It’s a lithograph, which is a type of printmaking, so the textures are very flat and the colors are consistent across the surface. The shapes remind me of Miro, but the way they are organized makes me think of architecture. The dark trapezoid near the top looks like a building casting a shadow, and the olive-colored sticks look like scaffolding. But it is also like a little theater with all these characters that are just shapes. The shapes are more or less contained within the red field, but near the top and bottom edges there’s this beige color peeking out like a frame within a frame. It gives the feeling that the image is a fragment of something larger that we can’t quite see. In that sense, this piece reminds me of Leger, particularly his interest in machine forms and the interplay between abstraction and representation. What could these shapes represent? It’s a question with infinite possibilities.