Gustave Baumann. Gustave Baumann was an American printmaker and painter, and one of the leading figures of the color woodcut revival in America.
His works have been shown at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and the New Mexico Museum of Art. He is also recognized for his role in the 1930s as area coordinator of the Public Works of Art Project of the Works Progress Administration.
Gustave Baumann was born in Magdeburg, Germany, and moved to the United States in 1891 with his family. By age 17 he was working for an engraving house while attending night classes at the Art Institute of Chicago.
He returned to Germany in 1904 to attend the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich where he studied wood carving and learned the techniques of wood block prints. After returning to the United States, he began producing color woodcuts as early as 1908, earning his living as a graphic artist.
He spent time in Brown County, Indiana as a member of the Brown County Art Colony, developing his printmaking technique. He followed the traditional European method of color relief printing using oil-based inks and printing his blocks on a small press. This contrasted with the trend at the time of many American artists to employ hand rubbed woodblock prints in the Japanese traditional style. By this time he had developed his personal artist's seal: t