Gustave Baumann, Master Craftsman

When I lived in Santa Fe, Wednesday evenings and Sunday mornings I walked the street where the wealthy, the doctors, the lawyers, the mercantile presidents, and artist Robert Henri, once had their homes on Palace Avenue. Adobe walls tumbled with green growth and lilac and blooming cacti and climbing ivy and there was the discovery of hidden little doors for short or hunched-necked humans and tiny ones near the ground, perhaps for little prowling cats. Narrow gray sticks lined side-by-side, tied so neatly together that I thought of clean sweeping brooms as I breathed in the rich scent of burning cedar and sage. Red bricks and yucca and agave and rabbit brush peeked out from above and below. In the evening, as the light lessened and the air began to cool, I put my hands on the sun-baked mud and straw adobe to let the heat of the day warm them. 

I walked twice a week from where Palace and Canyon Road met to where Palace and Paseo de Peralta came together near the Episcopal Church of the Holy Faith. Once a week for choir practice or Evensong and once a week for the church service. Singing with this choir was the closest thing to Heaven on earth I’d ever experienced with its joy, comradery, welcome, and beauty. In white robes, carrying black folders, the choir filed into two sides of pews facing one another in the chancel. During the service, we would turn to the altar with its golden cross and lit candles and stained glass over the main altarpiece carved by the friend of my great grandmother, Gustave Baumann.

In 1943, the Church of the Holy Faith commissioned Baumann to carve reredos, the large piece behind the altar, and it took him two years to complete the task. The central panel depicts Christ the King in copper, gold and silver glory. On either side of him is Saint Paul and Saint John. You can tell which is which by the symbols representing aspects of each of their lives and, even more conveniently, by the SJ and SP. The panels on the wings show four human figures representing white, red, black, and yellow races. The panels at the very ends each depict an angel.

Each year, the reredos get to take part in the spiritual journey of Holy Week. On Maundy Thursday, after the priests, adorned in full ceremonial grandeur, kneel to wash the feet of the members of the congregation in a beautiful demonstration of the commandment to love one another, and after a shared Last Supper, the wings are folded in, the altar stripped bare, and Baumann’s reredos are locked up to represent the stark separation experienced during the arrest and crucifixion of Christ. On Easter, all is unlocked, opened, and filled with flowers.

Creating over 300 color woodcut prints during his fifty-year career, Gustave Baumann was always working with his hands in a similar constant energy and driven ethic as my great grandmother. Perhaps this was why they were friends. They also shared an abundant sense of humor. In 1952, they participated together in an art exhibition called “No Savvy Arte” on display at the art museum in Santa Fe. Gustave Baumann made a “Hopalong Chastity” abstract of a shining white knight overriding all obstacles. My great grandmother Pansy Stockton, recently returned from a short stay on the East Coast, created a self-portrait out of nature that she called “Pansy On Her Return to Santa Fe,” so happy to be back that she bursts out of the frame. A number of Santa Fe artists joined in the fun. 

Gustave Baumann made the stamps that Pansy used on the back of her sun paintings. My cousins have three of them.

And I know that Gustave Baumann, his wife Jane, and daughter Ann visited the kiva Pansy built with her own hands at Fremont Ellis’ San Sebastian Ranch because they signed her guestbook in 1945.

The symbol that Gustave Baumann put in the middle of his signature is a Koshare symbol that stands today in wrought iron form at the top of the house he designed and lived in at 409 Camino de las Animas. If you look, the letters of the word KOSHARE are creatively arranged in the symbol. In Hopi Kachina and New Mexico Pueblo ceremonies, a Koshare is a humorous jester in horizontal white and black stripes with a horn-like hat, often bearing a watermelon. Koshares are loud, boisterous, and enjoy satirizing life and playing tricks in order to teach lessons. Koshares exist beyond moral and social codes and ridicule even the most sacred things in order to keep people in line and mirror values. The Koshares are highly regarded. A person is not born a Koshare, but it comes to him, like a calling. 

Although much of his art was serious, it’s likely that Gustave Baumann saw himself in the role of satirist and humorist in his relationships with people. 

He also had a deep commitment to excellence from the heart as demonstrated by his other symbol, a cadmium orange heart with a hand carved around it, a symbol he created while he was in Indiana in 1912.

Born in Magdeburg, Germany on June 27, 1881, Gustave Baumann came to Chicago when he was ten. It was his mother who wanted to move to America in hopes that the family would become successful. It was thanks to his cabinet maker father that Gustave Baumann learned the creative potential of wood. It was also thanks to his father that Gustave Baumann ended up with the responsibility of taking care of his mother and siblings when his father left the family soon after they arrived in the United States, sometime before 1893. In an effort to take care of everyone, as a young man Gustave Baumann worked as a commercial artist, doing illustrations for books, art for calendars, and advertising design. 

After winning some money, he returned to Germany to study wood carving and wood block print technique at the Kunstgewerbeschule (Arts and Crafts School) in Munich in 1905. He returned to Chicago in 1907 to continue supporting his family.

In 1910, he remained in rural Nashville, Indiana after a vacation because he found the place conducive to woodblock print making. He worked from six in the morning to ten at night. 

He began to win awards for his print making in 1915, notably a gold medal for woodblock printing at the acclaimed Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. In 1917, he set up a studio in Westport, Connecticut.

In 1918, a visit to Taos, New Mexico changed the course of his life. He considered the artist colony at Taos a distraction from work, however, Santa Fe to the south appealed to him. Almost out of money, he nearly returned to Chicago when Edgar L. Hewett, eager to build an art community in what he publicized as “The City Different,” loaned Baumann five hundred dollars in living expenses to set up a studio in the basement of the Museum of Fine Arts.

“Baumann found Santa Fe to be a better match for someone wanting to work hard among congenial associates in the magical setting of the Southwest. He quickly fell for the new color palette, the variety of shapes that he found in the plant life, the architecture, the landscape, and the people,” (p. 10, Paula A. Baumann, 2012).

It is likely that Edgar L. Hewett invited Baumann to camp in the caves where Native Americans once lived at his archeological site in Frijoles Canyon in what is now Bandelier National Park. Baumann created woodblock prints of the pictographs he found on the cave walls, sometimes having to cut his own steps in order to get up to those caves. Well over a decade later, Baumann put these woodblock print pictographs together in a book that he published in 1939 calledFrijoles Canyon Pictographs. It was selected as one of the Fifty Books of the Year in 1939 by the American Institute of Graphic Arts. 

By 1923, he had enough income to hire Chicago architect Tjalke Charles Gaastra to build a house on what was then College Street or East Buena Vista and is today Camino de las Animas (path of the animals). The house is now under the care of the Historic Santa Fe Foundation. To this day, it is filled with Baumann’s carving and artistic touches including the iron Koshare symbol at the top of the house, the carved G.B. and MCMXXIII over the door, the octagonal gallery, discarded wood blocks as radiator covers, and a print over the corner fireplace that Baumann created of the deer-hunt pictographs from Frijoles Canyon. 

In 1925, Baumann married Jane Devereux Henderson who was 32, twelve years younger than Baumann. Jane was a trained opera singer who studied in Paris and once lived with a family at Santa Clara Pueblo. Jane would often sing indigenous music using a Native American drum as accompaniment, so it is likely that she sang and played the drum while visiting my great grandmother’s kiva in the 1940s.

Gustave and Jane Baumann were Quakers, so it is also likely that they knew the artist Olive Rush and were part of the Santa Fe Friends Meeting group that ultimately was at 630 Canyon Road.

Their daughter Ann Baumann was born on July 31, 1927. Around that time, Baumann began carving marionettes and eventually creating a marionette theatre. His daughter Ann grew up considering the marionettes her friends.

In 1926, Gustave Baumann made the head of the first Zozobra, then a 20-foot high (now 50-foot high) effigy to gloom as per the vision of Will Shuster. The effigy was set ablaze to destroy the cares and worries of the past year by the fire spirit, a part danced by Jacques Cartier for 30 years. Cartier said, “It damn near killed me half a dozen times and I even broke both my ankles. Thank God not at the same time.” The tradition continues today, with locals writing down their fears and troubles, collecting them together, and burning them with the Zozobra as the official start of Las Fiestas de Santa Fe the Friday before Labor Day. 

In 1931, Gustave and Jane Baumann set-up a mobile marionette theater they called The Santa Fe Puppet Wranglers. Gustave carved puppets, painted backdrops, wrote scripts, and Jane directed. They toured New Mexico, including a noteworthy show in a storefront in Central City, Colorado, and created Christmas shows in their living room. Gustave Baumann created puppets of dragons, duendes (mischievous elves), brujas (witches), saints, angels, eagle dancers, wild west characters, pueblo characters, tourists, public officials, local celebrities, his wife, his daughter, and himself. Humor was a hallmark of these play sketches and some are based on Mexican and Native American legends.

In all that he created, Gustave Baumann cared about his craft and could work for hours without stop. His wife remembered that he would go outside in the middle of the night in order to determine the right tones for the layers of colors for his night scenes. He would carve a different block for each layer of color, building them from dark to light, which was different from the common approach to go from light to dark, sometimes giving the images a little bit of the look of a negative. He was among the first artists in the United States to use metallic silver leaf in printmaking. 

Gustave Baumann made his own ink and ground his own pigments. He used a Reliance Midget hand press that he bought in Chicago in 1917 for most of his printmaking and that small press is part of the recreated studio that can be visited at the New Mexico History Museum right behind the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. For more information about the studio, select The Palace Press Baumann Studio. 

To watch a video about Gustave Baumann created by New Mexico PBS, select  NMPBS ¡COLORES!: Gustave Baumann.

For another video about Gustave Baumann, select COLORES – Hands of a Craftsman, Heart of an Artist: Gustave Baumann.

For a video that goes through the steps of creating a print, select Gustave Baumann’s Printmaking Workshop.

SOURCES:

Abatemarco, Michael. Etched in wood: The Printmaking of Gustave Baumann. Pasatiempo: The Santa Fe New Mexican. September 28, 2018.

Abatemarco, Michael. Anatomy of a print: Gustave Baumann’s “Church Ranchos de Taos.” Pasatiempo: Santa Fe New Mexican. May 15, 2020. 

Baumann, Paula A. Gustave Baumann: Color Woodcut Printmaker. Xavier University Department of Art, Art History Thesis. 2012.

Gustave Baumann House. Historic Santa Fe Foundation. Retrieved October 2020. 

Hice, Michael. Koshares – The Sacred Clowns. Santa Fe Always Online. Retrieved October 2020. 

New Mexico: Memorial to Bishop Harden. The Living Church. August 26, 1945. 

Weideman, Paul. The Artist in Residence: The Gustave Baumann House. Pasatiempo: The Santa Fe New Mexican. September 28, 2018. 

Weideman, Paul. The Jane & Gustave Baumann House. Historic Santa Fe Foundation: Bulletin. Volume 32, Number 1, Spring 2010. 

Zieselman, Ellen. Hanging Around with Gus: The Printmaker as Puppetmaster. Pasatiempo: The Santa Fe New Mexican. September 28, 2018.