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Lot description
Signed 'P Baum' in violet lower left. Following stays in the Dutch province of Zeeland, in Istanbul and in the south of France, Paul Baum worked in the Tuscan town of San Gimignano from 1912 to 1914. This was the result of his one-year grant to work at the “Villa Romana” in Florence, which acquainted him more closely with the Italian culture and landscape. During his stay Baum created a large number of drawn and painted views of the hilly landscape, often enlivened through farmsteads, prominent church towers and the cypresses that are so characteristic of this region. The work offered here, “Straße an Feldern”, provides a good example of how Baum’s style had changed since his river landscapes from Hyères in terms of his use of colour and brushstroke. While the French landscapes were still defined by a yellowish-orange general tone and extremely small dabs of paint, his Italian paintings are characterised by light shades of green and a unified application of the paint in washes. The composition of the pictures also changed: instead of receding parallel planes, our gaze is now drawn into the distance by a broad lane following a diagonal course. Overall the painting is graphically structured through a delicate, but precise use of line – and this stylistic technique was also an artistic achievement from his period working in Italy. As Simone Wiechers, the author of the Baum monograph, writes: “the previously attained, uniform brightness of his oil painting underwent a further intensification there” (Simone Wiechers, Paul Baum, Weimar 2007, p. 132). In 1924 Baum returned for a final journey to San Gimignano because, as he himself wrote, “his best pictures were created there” (cited in Carl Hitzeroth, Paul Baum. Ein deutscher Maler, Dresden 1937, p. 62).