Gustave Baumann was the leading American color woodcut printmaker of the early twentieth century, and the artist most responsible for translating the landscape, light, and visual culture of northern New Mexico into one of the most beloved bodies of work in American printmaking.
Gustave Baumann (June 27, 1881 – October 8, 1971) was a German-born American printmaker and painter, widely regarded as the central figure of the early twentieth-century American color woodcut revival. Born in Magdeburg, he emigrated as a boy with his family to Chicago, returned to Germany to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich, and continued his training at the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1909 to 1917 he was a working member of the Brown County Art Colony in Indiana, where he developed the color relief printing technique that would define his career, and in 1915 he was awarded the gold medal for printmaking at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, the recognition that established his national reputation.
In 1918 he settled permanently in Santa Fe, where he would remain for the next fifty-three years and become one of the central figures of the city's twentieth-century art community. He worked in the traditional European method of color relief printing, oil-based inks, hand-carved blocks, a small press, and his subjects ranged across the New Mexican and broader Southwestern landscape, ancient petroglyphs and pictographs, Pueblo life, gardens, and orchards. He also carved a large body of marionettes that he and his wife Jane toured across the state, performing Hispanic and Native folk stories. The New Mexico Museum of Art holds the largest collection of his work; his prints are also held in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and other major American collections.