For half a century, Willi Baumeister had a decisive influence on the development of German artistic life in the field of non-representational art. The painter, graphic artist, stage designer, typographer, art theorist, author, and university lecturer is regarded worldwide as one of the most important artists of modernism and counts among the most significant pioneers of the German avant-garde. Seen from an art historical distance, Baumeister succeeds most consistently in further developing the innovative ideas of his teacher Adolf Hölzel and expanding them into something entirely his own in a permanently changing work process that expresses itself in manifold development phases. In Baumeister's work, the figurations increasingly merge with the colors and create an interlocking of color and contour line forms. Beginning with his group of works titled as the African series, after 1940 the continued reduction steps formed archaisms in which mythical content began to express itself. Through the use of cryptic characters, Baumeister succeeds in fulfilling the reductive requirements of the abstract pictorial idea while simultaneously evoking narrative associations with abstract means. He creates works of art in which hidden formulas are thematized, which rule in secret, behind reality. The fact that form and its application are thereby declared the primary pictorial content is consistent with Baumeister's idea of the "unknown in art."