Inspiration for Ruth Baumgarte's 18-part series “A la recherche du temps perdu”

In 1984, a large-format watercolor depicting a sand playground was one of the first works to kick off Ruth Baumgarte's series “A la recherche du temps perdu” (In Search of Lost Time). In the title, the well-read artist refers to the French poet Marcel Proust and his famous classic novel “A la recherche du temps perdu”, which was published from 1913 to 1927. What is the theme of this monumental 20th century novel? In the key scene of the novel, the first-person narrator frees himself from his inability to bring most of his past back to light. Biting into a madeleine dipped in tea becomes the decisive trigger for the first-person narrator. The taste of the pastry suddenly awakens a lost universe that is only now coming back to him: the memory of the days of his childhood. The novel's first-person narrator is reminded not only of the old days, but also of the child's appearance. In an immense act of imagination and self-remembering, he now works through his experiences, which are autobiographically based on Marcel Proust's life. One insight of the novel “A la recherche du temps perdu” is that the time experienced is irretrievably lost if it is not actively captured in memory or in a work of art.

The power of imagination in Ruth Baumgarte's “A la recherche du temps perdu”

This loose series of 18 large-format works on paper was created by Ruth Baumgarte between 1984 and 1999. The artist creates themes and motifs that revolve around various memories of her own visual and living world. They range from very personal to historical reflections on the present and past or lost world, from autobiographical experiences to collective events. What artistic means does the artist use to vividly depict the complex diversity of her memories and the “search for lost time” (“A la recherche du temps perdu”)? If Marcel Proust uses smell and taste as an aesthetic portal to memory, Ruth Baumgarte uses visual means such as contrasting color spectra and unusual spatial constellations in her paintings to suggest the power of imagination in the figures she depicts. Behind the representational reality that Ruth Baumgarte pursued in her work throughout her life lies a mysterious imaginary world. Both the artist and the viewers of the “A la recherche du temps perdu” series are unable to understand and interpret this pictorial world, which is permeated by elements of symbolism and surrealism, down to the last detail.

Themes: age, images of women, legends of Catalonia

In terms of motifs, the series initially focuses on the three ages of life - childhood, adulthood and old age. In Ruth Baumgarte's work, motifs of childlike play are specific to the early phase of life and characterize the transition from childhood to adolescence: sandboxes and toys, dolls and red balloons appear. This playful freedom is considerably restricted in old age, as the work “Evening of Life II“ shows. The elderly woman's reduced mobility is not only physically noticeable in the walking stick she carries. Ageing also has massive psychological effects, which are symbolically illustrated by the shrunken, box-shaped interior in her composition. Another theme in her series “A la recherche du temps perdu” revolves around the emancipation of women and their detachment from the confining destiny of men. The artist places the female figure scenes sometimes in a realistic, sometimes in an imaginary environment that puzzles their appearance and their actions. In these dreamscapes, the women sit naked on the beach, turned away from us, or look directly at us from imaginary rooms, while the men remain in the background. While female nudes in the series “A la recherche du temps perdu” may appear vulnerable at first glance, their gaze and posture convey strength, willfulness and seductiveness. The fusion of the two worlds is only expressed once, in a love scene. Some of the narrative splinters in the series are inspired by the literary tradition of Catalonia.

Artistic realization of reflection and memory in “A la recherche du temps perdu”

The unity of the spatial representation is suspended in several watercolors of the series “A la recherche du temps perdu” similar to a nocturnal dream: Abrupt changes in size and perspective as well as spaces that change color determine the composition of the figure scenes and tell of the ruptures between dream, memory and reality. In this way, Ruth Baumgarte challenges the viewer's imagination and power of association with each work in her 18-part series “A la recherche du temps perdu”. 

The “Figura serpentinata” in antiquity and contemporary art

Ruth Baumgarte's work has made a significant contribution to translating motifs, themes and compositional forms of classical art into a contemporary visual language. Her impressive watercolor sheet “Relicts/Relicts I“ from 1987 is a vivid example of this. In this work, she uses the stylistic device of the classical “figura serpentinata”: she places the human figure in a fluid space-time structure and closely interweaves art-historical and contemporary elements.

The term “figura serpentinata” comes from Latin and is literally translated as serpentine line. It describes a human figure that spirals around a central axis so that the lower limbs point in one direction and the upper body almost in the opposite direction. The central example is the ancient marble group with Laocoon from the Vatican Museums. Since its rediscovery in 1516, the “Laocoon Group” has had a profound impact on artistic creation from the 16th century onwards due to the “figura serpentinata” in the central male figure. The influences are still visible today in contemporary art, including Anselm Kiefer, Horst Janssen and, in particular, Maria Lassnig. 

“Figura serpentinata": a motif of the transition between life and death

At the center of Ruth Baumgarte's work “Relicts” are two figures, a man and a woman, who are sinking into a subsoil from which they are trying to free themselves. The male figure stretches one cramped hand over the waterline, distorted by pain, and holds on to a long cloth with the other. Next to him, the female figure spreads her arms wide and seems to surrender to the inevitable. Her mouth is open, her eyes look fixedly upwards. What have they fled from? What is causing them pain?

The couple is obviously undergoing an agonizing process of transformation. They no longer appear human, but rather like strangers in their own skin. Ribs shimmer through their muscular limbs, which seem to dissolve at the edge of the picture. Just as the central figure in the ancient sculpture group is trying to free himself from snakes - hence the name “figura serpentinata” - the man in Baumgarte's work is trying to rid himself of the long bands of fabric around his body. The bands of fabric are reminiscent of creepers or shrouds in which corpses are wrapped. The man's writhing posture clearly echoes the central “Figura serpentinata” of the famous marble group and thus makes his struggle between life and death more visible. Symbolically heightened, the motif refers to the increased threat of nuclear contamination of rivers and seas since the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, which is indicated by a petrol can at the edge of the picture.

The influence of moving arts and Ruth Baumgarte's use of counter-rotating serpentinata structures

Due to her family roots in theater and film, Ruth Baumgarte was fascinated by the moving arts with their role plays and productions throughout her life. She already incorporated theater scenes into her drawings when she studied at the Berlin Academy of Fine Arts from 1941 to 1944. In her first portraits, she developed numerous figure variations with seated, reclining or standing figures, which she observed closely when drawing nudes at the academy, but also in her private surroundings. What is striking in her oeuvre are the frequent full-body depictions, which she depicted in unusual perspectives and almost cinematic scenes. Ultimately, her studies led the painter to use more complicated forms of expression such as the counter-rotating serpentinata structure in “Relics”, one of her most important works of the 1980s, and this artifice further heightened the drama of her expressive depiction of the body.

The hand study in Ruth Baumgarte's work

In her art, Ruth Baumgarte always focused on the seemingly visible reality, but in her figurative style she also turned early on to the inner experience. She always combined portraits of people in her private and everyday surroundings with a keen sense of observation of their complex inner world. Pen, pencil and brush became fundamental artistic instruments for the brilliant draughtswoman to ascertain herself and her surroundings. 

In the context of her body studies, studies of hand postures - hand studies - often appear, which sketch various forms of movement of a figure based on the depiction of hand gestures or gestures resulting from body movement. 

From the hand study to the autonomous representation of the hand

From 1970 onwards, Ruth Baumgarte repeatedly used the hand study to prepare works that memorably depicted socio-political and social issues, e.g. in the form of protest positions. Individual hand studies serve the artist as preliminary studies for paintings, watercolors or drawings and are a field of trial and error and experimentation. Her collection of drawings includes hand studies, arm and foot studies, head and hair studies. While in her sensitive portraits she usually depicted the close interplay of head, gaze and hand, in her socio-political portraits she soon allowed the hands to take on an independent pictorial role. The hand study thus develops into an autonomous work and the hand into an independent, “speaking” body. Hands are arranged in crowded formations that can be interpreted as a wake-up call to society.

In her hand studies, she explores the hand as an expressive medium of human expression. The focus is on physical gestures that encompass a much broader range of action from the wrist, so to speak, and reflect a world of feeling and life anchored between the individual and society. Seen in this light, her hand studies take on an outstanding leitmotif role in the treatment of pictorial themes that revolve around questions of human existence.

Children's portraits and the world of children

Portraits of children have a long tradition in the visual arts, dating back to antiquity. The design of portraits of children is closely linked to changes in the respective cultural and social history. What characterizes the modern portrait of a child? With the emergence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's revolutionary philosophy of childhood in the 18th century and the recognition of a child's independent personality in 19th century reform pedagogy, new subjects also developed in portrait art. Artists immersed themselves in the independent lives of children and conveyed their specific world in portraits. It is remarkable that over 80 autonomous portraits of children and over 300 depictions of children have survived in Ruth Baumgarte's oeuvre, some of which were created as a result of portrait commissions. She devoted her ongoing attention to children at play in particular.

Sensitive portraiture

Although Ruth Baumgarte also created still lifes and landscape paintings, people and their portraits in all their forms and facets were the focus of her oeuvre. With her sensitive feeling for hidden developments in society, she captured the changing emotional and psychological moods and always focused her attention on the youngest, on children.

From the 1940s to the 1960s, she produced numerous portraits of children, portraying her own children from infancy to adulthood and children in her circle of friends and acquaintances. With early portrait commissions, including numerous portraits of children, she earned a living for her family shortly after 1945. In her portraits of children, she lovingly documented the self-absorbed play of adolescents, portraying them reading, eating or sleeping. The delicately outlined facial features reflect the emphatic gaze of an artist and mother, who revealed the child's individual character in their respective habitus.

Epochal portrait of youth

In her commissioned portraits of children, the artist often concentrates on the child's face and bust alone, placing it in isolation against an abstract color background. In contrast, portraits with self-selected child models tell the contemporary history that shines through their faces and convey oppressive living conditions, such as her expressive series of portraits of children during the Second World War. The painter also wove her portraits of children into a multi-layered tapestry of symbols and, inspired by Renaissance painting, lent the portrait an overarching meaning through architectural, floral, fruit or animal elements. Ruth Baumgarte's portraits of children thus introduce us to the world of the youngest in a multifaceted way and, in certain periods of their lives, also develop into epochal portraits of youth during the Second World War and the post-war period. Her portraits thus make a decisive contribution to the art history of children's portraits in the 20th century.

Readers in art

Readers oscillate between the real world and the world of the text. The mysterious pose of readers has always fascinated artists and inspired them to translate and interpret the experience of reading into a visual experience. Women bent over a book or leaning back comfortably with a book in their hands are among the most popular motifs in painting. Even the Virgin Mary is always shown at the Annunciation with a book proclaiming the purity of her thoughts. But even later, women were often portrayed with books.

Ruth Baumgarte has depicted numerous women reading in her wide-ranging oeuvre, but male readers are also part of her regular repertoire of motifs. In the readers and their inner dialog with the book, she explored an invisible world that is actually difficult to depict using artistic means.

Reading children: an example

In her works, Ruth Baumgarte repeatedly turns to reading children and portrays them in their self-absorbed activities. Motifs from her family environment are suitable for carefully approaching her models, such as Didi, her aunt's foster son. In her largest watercolor portrait to date, “Boy Reading with Monkey (Dieter/Didi)“ from 1947, she masterfully captures the inner world of the reading Didi and invents specific means of working out the silent, elusive dialogue between the reader and the book. The boy's glowing cheeks reveal that he is deeply absorbed in his reading. Shades of red and green lend the scene a pulsating intensity. The background in particular, which has been painted with a brush like absorbent cotton, envelops the half-naked body like a warm blanket. Through the intimate spatial design, the artist not only sensitively emphasizes the fragility and need for protection of the person portrayed, but also makes the concentrated reading and contemplation of the adolescent visible through the expressive colour space in red and green.

The fact that reading encompasses all generations, from young to old, can be seen in other drawings of her private surroundings and on her travels. The typical motif of the reading woman can then be found more in her illustrative work from 1949 onwards, when she became a sought-after illustrator in the book and newspaper industry and supplied the daily newspaper “Freie Presse” and the weekly magazine “Das Magazin der Hausfrau” with numerous illustrations. Ruth Baumgarte herself was an accomplished reader, which was reflected not least in some of the titles of her illustrations. And she recognized that books and readers are crystallization points whose depictions demonstrate a common humanity that connects cultures and eras.

Art and melancholy

Melancholy is a state of mind that puts people in an introverted, pensive to melancholy mood. At the same time, melancholy is seen as an essential driving force of art. Artists and people with creative talents, it has been argued, have a deep understanding of the world, which is often associated with a melancholic and pensive disposition. 

How should we understand figures who adopt a melancholy attitude in Ruth Baumgarte's works, such as in her drawing “Life” from around 1950? Here, our gaze falls on the bust of an oversized female figure sitting amidst various constellations of smaller groups of figures. Aspects such as the unreal composition of the picture, the oversize and specific posture of the female figure suggest that a symbol, an allegory, is embodied here: that of the idea of “melancholy”? 

Ruth Baumgarte has often played with motifs, themes and compositional forms of classical art in her work and translated them into a contemporary visual language. With this drawing, she created an independent view of the theme of melancholy and reflected on her own field of tension between working and being a freelance artist. At this time, she was making a name for herself as an artist and was successful as a graphic artist in the book and newspaper press. Her commissions enabled her to earn a living for several years.

Like other depictions of melancholy (e.g. by Albrecht Dürer, Caspar David Friedrich or Edvard Munch), her figure is leaning her head in her hand and looking to the side. In her pensive posture, she reflects her surroundings, the lively carousel of figures, which is driven solely by women. The numerous scenes form a kind of “wheel of life”, showing women in roles that they had to fulfill in society: caring for the sick, serving, sewing, ironing, planting the garden, making music, dancing, acting as a mother and - not yet a matter of course for women around 1950 - driving a car. At the bottom right of the picture, as an observer at the edge of the stage, so to speak, Ruth Baumgarte depicts herself with pen and ink and paper not only as a working artist, but also as the creator of the work before us.

With this ingeniously composed ink drawing on the theme of melancholy, Ruth Baumgarte, clairvoyant and before the time of the successful women's movement around 1968, reminds us of the important role of working women in society and at the same time of the essential driving force of inspiration for art, which, according to Schopenhauer, arises from the special mood of melancholy.

Self-portrait in the mirror of portrait art

People and their faces have occupied Ruth Baumgarte throughout her career. Early on, she discovered the portrait as the ideal pictorial genre for gaining a differentiated image of herself and other people. In total, as the artist noted in the 1980s, she produced over 800 portraits. Her self-portraits, which she produced in loose succession over the course of her seven-decade career, form a special form in order to reflect significant transitional and upheaval phases in her life and work.

Stages of the self-portrait from 1940 to 2011

Her earliest surviving self-portrait is a chalk drawing from around 1940 in which she has worked out the characteristic features of her face through precise self-observation. With her head slightly turned, her mouth slightly open and her eye highlighted in black, she looks unerringly at the person opposite her. According to the portrait's message, all her senses are open to the world and at the same time turned towards it with restrained energy. The certainty of the lines and the anatomically correct proportions of the face indicate that the young Ruth had already received drawing lessons. Her mother made sure that she attended Emmy Stalmann's Private Art School of the West in Berlin's Kantstraße at the age of 15; from there she transferred to the State Academy of Fine Arts in 1941. From then on, drawing would become the most important medium of her artistic career and precise observation one of the most important ways of ascertaining herself and her surroundings. 

In the early years of the post-war period, her bohemian “Early Self-Portrait” in the supreme discipline of oil painting marked her declaration that she saw herself as part of Western modernism and confidently joined the important - previously predominantly male-dominated - tradition of artist portraits in the studio. In her self-portrait, she confronts her subject with the insignia of painting, filling the space. In the background, a stretched line with play dolls can be seen. Through the resulting diagonal, the artist virtuously interweaves her new role as a mother (since 1947), indicated by the toys, with her profession as an aspiring painter and makes it clear in her self-portrait in a dynamic way that she is ready to compete in both areas.

Her penultimate „Self-Portrait (… at the Door)“ from 1979 reveals that the painter was at another important turning point in her life. Dressed in a shirt and vest, she stands close in front of us, her gaze fixed on her life and at the same time waiting. She has raised her hand, cropped from the lower edge of the picture, in greeting or in farewell. Her other hand grasps the jamb of an open door. In the background, she sketchily suggests a big city backdrop in shades of blue and yellow, presumably the metropolis of Berlin, which was once the center of her life and which she is trying to preserve for herself in lived memory. 

Her ambiguous gesture draws attention to the deep cuts that the artist reflects on in this self-portrait. Due to previous serious strokes of fate in her personal environment, she sees her past life passing between memory and the present, between Berlin and somewhere in the middle of nowhere. With a raised hand, she makes it clear that she sees herself on the threshold of questioning her life, freeing herself from the structures she has lived and entering the “open”, the unknown. Following the motto: Turn your face towards the sun and the shadows will fall behind you. 

The artist portrayed herself again shortly before her death. In her last self-portrait from around 2011, she opted for a bust portrait that conveys an inner movement in the rotation of the view. With fine chalk strokes, she outlines her aged facial features succinctly and without embellishment. Unclear outlines on the chin and head indicate that the figure is in a state of transition and that some parts are even in the process of disappearing. The eyes are absorbed and no longer seem to be directed towards a future. And yet the artist consciously directs our gaze to her eyes and the bright forehead area in order to emphasize the interplay of perception and spirit, seeing and reflection in her self-portrait.

Women artists and their self-portraits

In her 18 self-portraits between 1940 and 2011, Ruth Baumgarte used a variety of techniques - oil, watercolor, chalk, charcoal, red chalk, bister and pen and ink - and thus created her own varied art history of the female self-portrait. In doing so, she fits quite naturally into the tradition of the female self-portrait, which was to assert itself ever more strongly with Käthe Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Frida Kahlo and Maria Lassnig.

Sinti and Roma have lived in Germany and Europe for centuries and were often persecuted and discriminated against. Nevertheless, the Sinti and Roma have had a considerable influence on the iconography of European art and culture from the 15th century to the present day, as the following picture shows by way of example. The chalk drawing “Gypsies in the Rain”, like the early ink drawing “Workers on the Roof”, occupies a special place in Ruth Baumgarte's early artistic oeuvre. The controversial content of the work was overlooked for a long time. It was not until research by historians and academics in Berlin and researchers at the Ruth Baumgarte Art Foundation that Ruth Baumgarte's connection to the fate of the Sinti and Roma in Berlin during the 1940s was uncovered. In this context, it should be pointed out that the term “gypsy” in the title of the painting stems from a historical understanding that romanticized the life of the supposedly wild and free gypsies. Today, the term is considered outdated, prejudiced and discriminatory. This does not limit the artistic work's system-critical statement on the subject of Sinti and Roma.

Artistic work outside of academy classes

During her studies at the State Academy of Fine Arts from 1941 to 1944, the young Ruth learned how to accurately draw character scenes and translate the plot of plays into the medium of drawing in Gerhard Ulrich's graphics class. In Wilhelm Tank's classes she was introduced to the study of the body and anatomy and movement sequences, and in his lessons she was encouraged to look for motifs outside the studio on the street. In her movement pictures, the artist undoubtedly also benefited from her experience as a constant freelancer in the Berlin drawing film studios of Wolfgang Kaskeline. The Jewish artist and director, who was only allowed to produce with a special permit, was regarded as the German Walt Disney of the animation industry. 

This drawing stands out from her work, as the art student did not use a specific narrative template from a play or a story, but devised the theme, the detailed drawing and the scenic intensification herself. In a study in pen and ink from around 1942, she sketched the theme pointedly in advance. At the center of the scene are two Sinti and Roma musicians running away with an open umbrella; she noted the title “Gypsies in the rain” under the motif. 

While this small sketch still gives the impression that the two men are only fleeing because of the weather in order to protect themselves, the violoncello they are carrying and the violin in the case from the onset of a downpour, she relates the scene to other key pictorial elements in a larger drawing executed in chalk. Research has shown that with this motif, Ruth Baumgarte is depicting an event that she must have reflected on from her own experience of the Sinti and Roma. Martin Fenner elaborates: “In this drawing, it becomes evident that the musicians do not seek protection from the pending rain. Even though the tower clock does not indicate that it is „almost high noon“, the depicted railway tracks and barriers that the musicians must cross over and the shack visible on the right-hand side oft he drawing evoce association oft he deportations oft he Sinti and Roma carried out by the nazis. A fatalistic still life consisting of an empty bottle and an overturned pot sets the tone for how the scenery of threatening thunder and gloomy skies might be read.“ (exhib. cat. Ruth Baumgarte. Herkunft/Prägung/Zäsuren, Kulturhaus Karlshorst, Berlin 2017, p. 41). 

The realistically reproduced (now redesigned) Wuhlheide station with its characteristic tower clock in Berlin-Karlshorst, whose tracks still exist today, was the through station for deportation trains to the East. A police camp for other prisoners was located nearby. The artist's place of residence, Karlshorst, where she lived with her mother from 1935 to 1945, was also close to the Wiesengrund foliage colony, which in the 1930s and early 1940s was known to have housed Sinti and Roma families. It can be assumed that the artist not only observed the Sinti and Roma in their caravans on her bicycle rides through the neighborhood, but also had contact with them in secret despite the strict prohibitions of the Nazi regime. When the drawing was created, Sinti and Roma were systematically sent to the so-called “Gypsy camp” in Berlin-Marzahn, which was located around 20 km north of their home, where they were deported and imprisoned. The camp was dissolved by March 1, 1943 and its interned Sinti and Roma were deported to the Ausschwitz concentration camp. The memorial in Berlin-Marzahn is dedicated to the memory of the murdered Sinti and Roma and is now run by Petra Rosenberg, Chairwoman of the Berlin-Brandenburg State Association of German Sinti and Roma.

Due to the context described, the drawing cannot have been created as part of academic teaching at the university, as the content was too politically charged. Not only was the sympathetic depiction of marginalized groups of the Nazi regime, which included the Sinti and Roma, prohibited; by decree of the Reich Ministry of the Interior, the photographic or graphic depiction of freeways, waterways and railroad lines was also forbidden. These required written permission. Violators faced a penalty of six weeks in prison.

“Non-places” and the ‘marginalized’ in Ruth Baumgarte's work

It is striking that the 19-year-old draughtswoman developed a sensitive feeling for marginal and border areas in nature and the city, so-called “non-places” of industrialized modernity, at an early age. In her motifs, the budding artist reacted to the profound transformation of urban space in the 20th century. According to French anthropologist Marc Augé, these non-places are characterized by the fact that they have neither history nor identity, but create loneliness and anonymity. In Baumgarte's work, these include depictions of railroad stations and tracks, wooden sheds and, time and again, signaling systems and high-voltage power lines. A shed, railroad tracks and an electricity pylon are clearly recognizable in the right-hand half of the picture in the aforementioned drawing as expressions of the remote non-place that became the no-man's-land of the fleeing Sinti and Roma. The rampant mushroom growth on the border fence, which looks like intestines and which the fugitives are just passing, also points to this ominous place.

The cosmopolitan metropolis of Berlin not only offered the budding artist a place to learn art, but also revealed to her a richly contrasting and inexhaustible panorama of current social conditions on her daily S-Bahn journeys from Karlshorst to the city center to the academy in the Charlottenburg district, a “visual school” of the social present, so to speak. In this context, the realistic depiction of the Sinti and Roma in her work appears like a precisely observed portrait of the persecuted before the genocide. Even in her first nude drawings during her student days, the draughtswoman did not depict idealized bodies, but instead oriented herself towards reality, showing emaciated faces with sunken cheeks and bent, tense postures of female and male nude models. 

She was also confronted with political and racial victims of the Nazi dictatorship outside of Berlin, such as the Sinti and Roma. During a stay in the Giant Mountains (Riesengebirge), she witnessed the forced deportation of Jewish girls, which shook her to the core. According to the memoirs of her son Alexander Baumgarte, the young Ruth was informed about the actions of the “Jew catchers”. The renowned cultural historian Helmut Lethen describes how she dealt with the horrors of the Second World War in his contribution to the Catalogue Raisonné: “For Ruth Baumgarte, giving up was out of the question. In this atmosphere, the certainty arose for the young woman that the intensity of her life would be realized only by maintaining a distance from her surroundings. Only in this way could she preserve traumatic experiences in a capsule of silence” (Vol. I, Munich 2022, p. 27). From then on, she was highly sensitized to the suffering and inner turmoil of other people, as her diary entries from around 1944/46 make clear. She developed a sense of distance from the world that allowed her to become a precise observer of her time. 

Ruth Baumgarte shared her social interest in the Sinti and Roma with other personalities in her intellectual and literary environment. Due to her family roots, she was fascinated by the world of theater and film. From her childhood and youth, she maintained close contacts with the musical and literary intellectual world. Her friendships included the later composer and music director Heinz Struve (1925−2015), who published his memoirs in the autobiography “Im Dschungel − zwischen Nazis und Stalinisten” in 2013. In it, he mentions a memory of his first encounter with Sinti and Roma, who “probably paraded past his house on stilts as an advertisement for their circus” (Frankfurt/M. 2013, p. 37), an experience he shared with the young Ruth, who later reported it repeatedly. She was also closely acquainted with the writer and painter Hans Scholz (1911−1988), a lecturer at her art school. Private Kunstschule des Westens. The depictions of the artist in her illustrations in the 1950s may seem like atmospheric reminiscences of their lifelong friendship, which show a scenically comparable correspondence with motifs from the film adaptation of his 1955 novel “Am grünen Strand der Spree”. In Scholz's novel, it is striking that the author seems to allude to the artist's life several times. This is indicated by a number of references by name. The novel characters “Ruth Ester Loria” and “Busse”, the name of Ruth Baumgarte's first husband, for example, suggest that the two artists were closely connected and could look back on shared experiences. After all, as Scholz emphasized in an interview, he had not made anything up in his book and had experienced everything himself (see also Catalogue Raisonné Ruth Baumgarte, vol. III, p. 119). The bestseller, which was made into a film in 1960, is the first to show the mass murder of the Jewish population in the German-occupied Soviet Union. The broadcast was classified by researchers as a “breaking of the collective silence”. Hans Scholz was head of the arts section of the Berlin “Tagesspiegel” from 1963-1976 alongside Heinz Ohff and a member of the Berlin Academy of Arts from 1963-1988.

Little is known about the artist's connection to the Sinti and Roma families. However, Ruth Baumgarte's lasting encounter with the musicians, and certainly also her youthful and enlightened view of them as a symbol of the Sinti and Roma's free way of life, led her to show solidarity with members of the Sinti and Roma and other people who were not part of bourgeois society throughout her life. 

Remembering Ruth Baumgarte and her work on the Sinti and Roma

The artist Ruth Baumgarte was honored with a memorial stele at her former place of residence, Rheingoldstraße 32 in Berlin-Karlshorst, for her system-critical artistic treatment of the racially, religiously and politically motivated crimes during National Socialism, which included the persecution of the Sinti and Roma. This was erected in 2020 at the place where Ruth Baumgarte lived with her mother during her training and studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste from 1938 to 1945 until the invasion of the Soviet troops and the final battles at Rheingoldstraße 32. 

Remembering Ruth Baumgarte and her work on the Sinti and Roma, the artist Ruth Baumgarte was honored with a memorial stele at her former place of residence, Rheingoldstraße 32 in Berlin-Karlshorst, for her system-critical artistic treatment of the racially, religiously and politically motivated crimes during National Socialism, which included the persecution of the Sinti and Roma. This was erected in 2020 at the place where Ruth Baumgarte lived with her mother during her training and studies at the State Academy of Fine Arts from 1938 to 1945 until the invasion of the Soviet troops and the final battles at Rheingoldstraße 32. 

An artistically faithful, 1:1 scale copy of the depiction of the Sinti and Roma “Gypsies in the Rain” has been on permanent display at the Museum Lichtenberg in Berlin-Lichtenberg since 2021. 

The vanitas motif in Ruth Baumgarte's oeuvre: a parcours

What is vanitas? The term comes from the Latin language and is found in the Old Testament: “Vanitas vanitatum, et omnia vanitas”, which roughly means: “Everything is empty pretense or vanity”. “Vanity” can be equated with ‘worthless’ or ‘transient’. Vanitas symbols represent motifs of transience in art, which are understood as a warning and reminder of one's own death. Since their increased use in 16th and 17th century art, particularly in still life painting, they have exerted an unbroken fascination on artists to this day. Since then, they have repeatedly found their way into artistic creation, including Ruth Baumgarte, who explored the theme in numerous facets and used a surprising number of typical vanitas motifs throughout her work from the 1940s to the 1990s. Her group of traditional vanitas symbols includes the grave or cemetery, ruined architecture, ice floes and still life elements such as the book and, very frequently used, the extinguished candle. She also invents new vanitas symbols that are unmistakable signs of an anti-human civilized society, such as old or dying animals, broken crockery, damaged toy dolls or scrap cars.

In a tour through Ruth Baumgarte's oeuvre, the various uses of vanitas symbols in central works are now shown.

From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, the still-life genre, which traditionally belongs to the conceptual environment of vanitas, was a recurring repertoire in Ruth Baumgarte's work. In total, she created over 16 works, mainly in watercolor. Her “Still Life with Coffee Cup” from 1956 is a vivid example of how the artist addresses the finite and infinite nature of earthly existence in equal measure. The chrysanthemum, a popular flower motif in Impressionist painting, takes center stage in this still life. The delicately curved blossoms of the Asian flower form a harmonious ensemble with the blue and white tea service and the pale blue patterned curtain that delimits the room on the left. While the floral decorations and porcelain hint at the cosmopolitan nature of the household, the jug with its pewter lid and the red-striped kitchen towel on the table point to its down-to-earth nature. The extinguished candle in the brass stand and the open book show the transience of earthly pleasures, knowledge and aspirations and represent traditional vanitas motifs. 

Vanitas motifs ruins and cemetery

Works with obviously religious motifs are rarely found in Ruth Baumgarte's oeuvre. This large-format watercolor from 1969, „Church in County Killarney (Church in County Cork)“ revolves around the aspect of death and thus the theme of vanitas with numerous motif elements.

The man-sized gravestones, folded over at the sides, provide a view of two church buildings in which nature has already taken up residence. While green leafy trees indicate that it is summer, bare trees reveal the death of nature. The cemetery also appears abandoned and abandoned to decay. The dark colors in rust-red, blue and grey tones reinforce the gloomy atmosphere. Only in the tower area does a bright color spectrum of soft red to yellow tones light up as a hopeful counterweight. 

The motif of the church ruins chosen by the artist is firmly anchored in the tradition of vanitas symbols and German Romanticism around 1800, including that of Caspar David Friedrich. For the first time, nature was elevated to a mirror of one's own basic mood and the ruin became the ideal image for the transience and finiteness of life. In this work, Ruth Baumgarte revisits the special wet-on-wet technique of watercolor painting to express the transience of life (vanitas) in terms of painting technique. The atmospherically dense watercolor symbolically alludes to the death of her mother Margarethe Kellner-Conrady, who died unexpectedly in August 1969.

Events of the soul: Winter landscape and creature

The crystalline winter landscapes and still lifes that Ruth Baumgarte created from the 1970s onwards do not depict real scenes in her work, but rather embody events of the soul. They are symbolic representations of vanitas (transience) and death.

The subject of the winter landscape also refers to the theme of vanitas and occupied Ruth Baumgarte from the 1940s until she took it up again, seemingly abruptly, in the 1970s and 1980s. 

The watercolor “Late Winter” from 1975 represents a turning point in Ruth Baumgarte's oeuvre. The dominance of rational, economic thinking began to crack in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1970. Ruth Baumgarte reacted to the changes. Her depictions move away from realistic depictions towards sensually heightened pictorial compositions. She now used watercolor painting to express the new “ice age”, which the artist experienced in her private and public surroundings, through glass-like pictorial grounds. The crunching of the ice surface, another vanitas motif, can literally be heard when looking at the work “Late Winter”. The creature, be it human, animal or plant, stands like the centrally depicted cat on uncertain ground and must assert itself against the imponderable elements of nature. By deliberately shifting the proportions of animal and nature, Ruth Baumgarte symbolically charged the creaturely scene and created an impressive symbol of transience (vanitas) with the ice landscape.

Soulscapes: Vanitas motifs as a symbol

Her series “Winter Death”, with its focus on winter scenes, can also be understood as a symbol of the “ice age”. Exemplary for the series is the first work, which creates a soul landscape about the cycle of life and death. The center of the picture is occupied by a slumped figure whose oversized head lies frozen in the snow, while its body has been swallowed up by the watercourse. The hands, very large in contrast to the nearby row of trees, still seem to cling to the grass on the opposite bank, but the figure has already become part of a landscape that stretches to the horizon, in which solid contours and outlines have dissolved. In the misty haze, snow-covered farmhouses appear dimly in the background, hinting at the north of Germany.

The deliberate shift in physical proportions and the fusion of people and landscape have a surreal effect. Glass-like pictorial grounds form pale, restless surfaces in violet, blue and red, representing the transition to death (vanitas). The flowing pictorial grounds in the wet-on-wet technique reflect the transitory state of the portrait subjects on a technical painting level. Ruth Baumgarte sketched the motif on the occasion of the death of her aunt Anna-Marie Schubert on her deathbed in 1976, but did not realize it in this work until 1982. 

Vanitas motifs in the environment and civilization

For her watercolor sheet “Relicts II” from 1988, Ruth Baumgarte chose an unusual view of a vanitas motif. From a frog's-eye view, an oversized fish carcass lies on the beach close to the lower edge of the picture. Without a head and already partially skeletonized, it dominates the entire foreground. It is a larger sea fish that has been washed up on the shore by the nearby surf or has become part of the daily garbage of civilization.

The painter has deliberately kept the palette of watercolors in the range of transparent intermediate tones. Pale green, yellow and violet streaks of color hint at the progressive decomposition of the fish's body, which also provides an insight into its dark inner life. A pair of shoes lies in the center of the sheet. They stand side by side, as if the wearer has just taken them off while standing to go into the water. Their used, outdated appearance gives an indication of the person who wore them, a reference to the transience (vanitas) of life. The shoes thus represent an expressive still life of an object and at the same time a portrait of the absent person. Their pictorial history goes back to Vincent van Gogh's famous existential depictions of everyday objects such as shoes or keys.

The artist prepared the motif in her travel sketchbook on location, as evidenced by several photos and short films that show her drawing or painting in watercolors on the beach. Since the 1950s, she has traveled the world on numerous occasions, including frequently to Spain since the 1970s, especially to Catalonia in the northeast and its coast, such as the Bahia de Roses region depicted here.

As the short tour has shown, the artist has consistently created themes and motifs on the subject of vanitas in her work, which revolve around different moments of memory from her own visual and living world. Vanitas motifs such as animal carcasses, cemeteries or candles allude to the eternal cycle of life and death to which humans and creatures are inevitably subjected.