Nude

Trained as an architectural painter, Willi Baumeister expanded his practice to include printmaking, typography, and set design. He came to international prominence in the 1920s with work that embraced abstract form and ideographic signs, but when the Nazis gained power in 1933, his art was deemed “degenerate” and he was dismissed from his teaching post in Frankfurt. Although Baumeister’s photographs mostly served as an experimental adjunct to his work in other media, this image is more than a mere study: through the use of unusual cropping and complex negative shapes, a female nude verges into abstract design.