90 Year old German Impressionist (Willi Bauer) -IMPRESSES US with his new paintings!!

Sunny Day by the Lake

Willi Bauer

Oil

13 ½ x 16 ¼

$3,190.00

Gabriel Diego Delgado

Art Consultant

gabrield@jrmooneygalleries.com

Willi Bauer was born July 7, 1923 in the Spessart mountain range area in Northern Bavaria, Germany. He is considered one of the leading modern impressionist painters of our time.  Capturing the essence of the time honored landscapes, vibrant markets and bustling city scenes, Bauer executes with a stylistic endearment found only in those special artists who have been painting for over 70 years.  

Now in his 90’s, Bauer’s early art education in Berlin and his studies at the acclaimed  Städelschule School in Frankfurt, Germany anchored the artistic foundation to his scholarly art application and painterly approach.  

Willi Bauer, Oil,  13 ½ x 16 ¼,  $3,190.00

Sunny Day by the Lake is a smaller oil painting that generates a dynamic punch of pure impressionistic perseverance. 

 Holding true to a traditional modernist genre, Bauer delivers a miniature, but grandiose, painting that admiringly reflects his mentor, Otto Pippel with subtle homages to his great paintings like Sun Street in Munich and Munich Coffee Garden.  Heavy layers of quasi-pointillist technique create rhythmic blots of color across the landscape and open air bistro.  Reminiscent of impressionistic market scenes of the 1890’s, Bauer generalizes the figures, their garments and dining experience. However, minus all the details, the audience senses the formal and aristocratic aura of these patrons. 

With the white boat sails adding a triangular temple, pointing skyward, we are guided in the cool painterly palette of the calming harbor, hazy in a cerulean mist. Layers and layers of mountain ranges add depth and perspective to an otherwise flat pictorial composition. Bottom heavy, a strong horizontal is dominated by the prominent white paint on the street level.  

Bauer keeps us focused on the lower part of the painting; these banqueting ladies and gentlemen are bookended with purposefully arranged configurations between the two story brick building on the left and the repetitive tree verticals on the right.  The suppressed “v” shaped curve of the marina draws us back to these modernist figures, arriving at the two individuals standing in the middle- the man in the black suit coat and the woman in the white hat and brown shawl.

Willi Bauer’s paint palette is instinctively balanced with a mixture of earth tone browns, burnt siennas, and viridians juxtaposed by the chalky cobalt blue impasto perfections.  Speckled orange highlights dance across the table-scape like chords on sheet music.  Bauer creates artistic walla that evokes a second or third sensory experience to viewing his artwork.

J.R. Mooney Galleries has acquired two new Willi Bauer paintings, a unique trove of fine art treasury.  With Bauer’s age and declining studio abilities, JR Mooney Galleries sees these important paintings as part of this German artist’s career.

©Gabriel Diego Delgado