Series Spotlight - Rudolf Bauer

Although Rudolf Bauer initially supported himself by creating illustrations and caricatures for major magazines and newspapers, he expanded his art style from commercial and figurative to also include abstraction in 1912. It was this same year that he met Herwarth Walden, the founder of the Berlin-based avant-garde group Der Sturm. This group created an eponymous magazine and gallery that covered non-objective art such as Expressionism, Cubism, Dadaism and Surrealism, and included artists like Kandinsky and Klee. Bauer was invited to participate in a group show at the gallery in 1915 and continued to participate until the mid-1920s. He even had solo exhibitions in 1917, 1919 and 1920 and became a teacher at the Sturm School.

Bauer’s work, alongside Kandinsky, was the abstract art that inspired Solomon R. Guggenheim to start collecting modern-contemporary art and creating foundations and museums to highlight this work. Deemed the creator of ‘degenerate art’, as most modern art was in 1930s Germany, Bauer was arrested by the Nazi party in 1938 and held in a Gestapo prison for months until Guggenheim and his team were able to free him. He still created dozens of abstract drawings on scraps of paper he managed to find during his imprisonment. Unsurprisingly, this inspired him to move to the USA merely months before World War Two began. Bauer’s art was featured on the invitation of the opening exhibition of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, now better known as The Guggenheim. Being quickly pressured into a contract that he did not fully understand, Bauer’s finances and future works became controlled by and owed to the Guggenheim Foundation, respectively and so, to spite the Foundation he refused to paint altogether until his death in 1953. When Guggenheim died in 1949 the trustees of his foundation changed their vision, removing Bauer’s art, and all the other non-objective art that Guggenheim had collected, from the walls of the museum, which is likely what caused Bauer and his art to fall into obscurity.