Athletes resting, 1929

About the Work

It was in the mid-1920s that Willi Baumeister began working on his so-called Sport Pictures depicting tennis and hockey players, boxers and runners. The drawing "Athletes Resting" belongs to this workgroup. In keeping with the title, a sense of stillness prevails over the scene; the figures look almost ossified. It is not the motifs that lend the drawing its lively quality, but the juxtaposition of organic and geometric as well as two- and three-dimensional forms and the various drawing mediums and techniques the artist employed. He incised lines in the cardboard, for example, creating a delicate interplay between elevation and depth on the picture surface.

About the Acquisition

From 1900 onwards, the Frankfurt chemist and industrialist Carl Hagemann (1867‒1940) assembled one of the most important private collections of modern art. It included numerous paintings, drawings, watercolours and prints, especially by members of the artist group “Die Brücke”. After Carl Hagemann died in an accident during the Second World War, the then Städel director Ernst Holzinger arranged for Hagemann’s heirs to evacuate his collection with the museum’s collection. In gratitude, the family donated almost all of the works on paper to the Städel Museum in 1948. Further donations and permanent loans as well as purchases of paintings and watercolours from the Hagemann estate helped to compensate for the losses the museum had suffered in 1937 as part of the Nazi’s “Degenerate Art” campaign. Today, the Hagemann Collection forms the core of the Städel museum’s Expressionist collection.