Mark Baum

Mark Baum (1903–1997) was a Polish-born American painter known initially for his self-taught landscapes and cityscapes who later developed a unique non-objective painting style focused on a single, unique glyph he called "the element."

Mark Baum (Marek in the Polish, Munyok at home) was born January 2, 1903, in Sanok, a town that is now part of Poland, but at the time was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, near modern-day Ukraine.

His parents divorced when he was a young child, a highly unusual event in his Conservative Jewish community.

His mother, having few options in her native land, emigrated to the United States with Mark's older sister.

Mark was left with his maternal grandparents who lived in Frysztak in the Carpathian Mountains.

Mark had very little contact with his mother and father from that point on.

Eventually Mark moved with his family to the larger town of Rzeszów, and when Mark was of schooling age, he defied his grandfather and took the test to attend the German gymnasium.

The test was held on Saturdays in order to discourage Jews from applying.

He got in and attended the gymnasium as well as Hebrew school, and was multilingual from a young age, speaking Yiddish at home, Hebrew in the temple, Polish on the streets, and German at school.

During World War I, Mark worked in the summers at his grandfather's farm outside of the city.

Mark recalled that in the summer of 1917 a few Russian prisoners of war were assigned to the farm.

They were Bolsheviks and through them, Mark received an entire political education.

They escaped one morning in October, having heard of the coming revolution in Russia, but not before telling Mark, then 14 years old, goodbye.

At the end of the War, Mark decided to leave home and emigrate to the United States.

He took trains to the end of German territory, arriving at the Danish border.

At this point, having no passport, he was able to literally run through the check point and was sheltered by a family who was able to get him to Copenhagen.

There, through family connections, he was able to obtain passage to New York City, where he arrived in late 1919.

In New York, he got a job in the garment district at a furrier's shop.

He reunited with his mother, whom he found to be very materialistic and the two of them did not have much contact after that.

Baum's early work had considerable success in New York in the late 1920s through the early 1940s, with a number of solo shows and museum placements at the Whitney Museum and the Frick, but following World War II, Baum withdrew from the New York art scene to Cape Neddick, Maine, where he lived and painted in relative obscurity from the mid-1950s until his death.

In the early 1920s, Mark was on the subway one day going home from work, having just been paid his week's wages in cash, that he looked down at the money in his hand and asked himself: "Did I really just come all this way for this?"

He sought out painting as more reflective of his humanity and spirit.

Mark became a WPA artist, which along with his job at the furrier, which he had maintained since the early 1920s, supported the family.

Baum briefly attended classes at the Academy of Design in 1924 or 1925, then in the summer of 1926 he studied at the Cape Cod School of Art in Provincetown, Massachusetts under Charles Hawthorne.

From then on he painted on his own.

He fell into a rhythm of working half the year as a furrier and painting the other half, in the off season.

From the beginning, Baum's artistic style was distinctive.

He often worked in hatched marks, with flattened perspective, emphasizing the collapsing angles of buildings and landscapes instead of trying to provide lifelike spatial structure or perspective.

Initially he worked in watercolors, and his first solo exhibition featured a selection of watercolor landscapes and took place at the Whitney Galleries in 1929, with a few works bought by prominent collector Julianna Force who donated them eventually to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The following year, Baum approached famed photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who bought one of his watercolors.

In the early 1930s, Baum switched to working in oil paint, and Marie and Averil Harriman became ardent supporters of his work, with another solo show at the Marie Harriman Gallery in 1931.

Through these connections and shows Mark found a healthy collector base in the early 1930s.

During this period, and much to Baum's chagrin, his work was classified as "primitive," which was at the time a shorthand way of grouping it in with a nostalgic Americana (ironically given that he was Polish born) that stood in opposition to European modernism.

Mark rejected the word primitive outright, but also for its implications, writing in a personal statement: "Again the terms 'naive' and 'primitive' appeared in the reviews. Naive I never was. But although I was not a primitive painter, I did stand in a certain relationship to painting. Indeed, every reviewer when describing my work was forced to present certain modifications to the term 'primitive'. And when Harriet and Sidney Janis, knowing my work, then at work on a book of primitive painters, came to see me, they, too, realized this and later stated in their book that I was too advanced for a primitive painter."

He felt very influenced by modernist painters, among them Kandinsky, Klee, Picasso, Cézanne, and Mondrian, the latter two of whom he had a particular affinity.

Mark had almost no art education before coming to the United States, and it was in New York's museums and contemporary art galleries that he educated himself.

He was also part of a group show at the Brooklyn Museum in 1932.

In 1935 Mark married Celia Frank, a woman from Schenectady, New York.

Their son Paul was born the following year, and another son, William, was born in 1939.

The Baums first lived in Sunnyside, Queens, and then on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.