Baumann's career is the long, deliberate working life of an artisan printmaker — fifty years of carved blocks, hand-printed editions, and close observation of the landscape and culture of his adopted New Mexico — and the result is one of the most cohesive bodies of work in twentieth-century American art.
Baumann came to art through one of the most rigorous European training traditions then available. The Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich was at that time one of the leading European schools of decorative and applied art, and it gave him a thorough grounding in the disciplines of design, drawing, and the relief print. His subsequent enrollment at the Art Institute of Chicago consolidated that training within the American context.
The decisive period of his early career was the years he spent in Brown County, Indiana. The Brown County Art Colony, a loose association of painters and printmakers gathered around the small town of Nashville, gave him a working artistic community and a body of subject matter — the wooded hill country of southern Indiana — that he turned into a celebrated early body of color woodcuts. The exhibitions and prizes that followed established him as one of the leading American printmakers of his generation.
His move to Santa Fe was the second great relocation of his life. The city he arrived in was a small but unusually vital art colony, and the New Mexican subjects he found there — the high desert in summer storm and winter snow, the architecture and ceremonial life of the Pueblos, the cottonwoods and aspens of the upper Rio Grande, the petroglyphs of the surrounding canyons — became the material for the body of woodblock prints for which he is now best known. He worked methodically across the next five decades, hand-carving each block, mixing his own inks, and printing his editions himself on a small studio press. The combination of disciplined technique and deeply observed subject matter gave the prints their distinctive character: jewel-toned, carefully composed, almost decorative in surface but rooted in close, particular attention to landscape and light.
He extended his practice in several directions beyond the print itself. His 1939 publication Frijoles Canyon Pictographs— a book of woodblock prints based on the prehistoric Native designs and figures carved into the canyon walls of what is now Bandelier National Monument — translated his archeological interests into print form. The marionettes he carved for the puppet theatre he and Jane toured across New Mexico extended his work into performance and folk culture, and were as much a part of his life in Santa Fe as the prints.
His relationship with the New Mexico Museum of Art ran in close parallel to his career. He helped organize an exhibition there within a year of the museum's founding, and over the subsequent half-century the museum acquired the body of his sketchbooks, blocks, progressive proofs, paintings, and finished prints that now constitutes the most important institutional collection of his work. His death in Santa Fe closed a working life that had run almost continuously since the early 1900s, and his standing today is that of one of the indispensable figures of American printmaking and a defining artist of the New Mexican modern period.