Sagenhaft! 40 Jahre Samuelis Baumgarte Galerie

6 Vorwort 1 / Herr Baumgarte The Samuelis Baumgarte Gallery celebrates its jubilee year. 40 years ago in 1975, my mother Ruth Baumgarte – painter, graphic artist and the wife of an entre- preneur – decided to open a gallery, this at the age of 52! The fact that she chose the Artur-Ladebeck Street location testifies to her strong personality, her unshakeable belief in art and her boundless en- thusiasm for her colleagues’ work. She called her gallery “Das Fenster” (The Window). A gallery with a constant round of ambitious exhi- bitions quickly became the talk of the town, “with which she shattered the province’s crown glass panes,” as the former editor of the “Neue Westfäl- lischen”, Martin Bodenstein, wrote in his book: Mi- men, Maler und Mimosen from 1996. Bielefeld was at the time not an easy terrain for modern art. Not till 1968, and thanks to the mag- nanimous foundation of the Oetker family, could the Bielefeld Kunsthalle be built and opened. Although ”Somewhere in the middle of nowhere“ it did actually have a predecessor, the Kunsthaus, but since the 1970s it had never been able to com- mand the international clout of the Kunsthalle. At that time Bielefeld was a city that had to be kissed awake again and again with spectacular art pro- jects. In principle nothing has really changed even today. The need to be kissed awake seems to be an innate process of East-Westphalian mentality. At the end of the 1970s, I was myself still a child and allowed to witness the evolution of the gallery “Das Fenster” alongside of my mother: her engagement, her delights and hopes, but also her self-doubts. And soon I was working with her on the venue of East-Westphalia. For someone still growing up it is not always easy to figure out the road to be taken. At least I found it so. But art fascinated me. From way back when. It cast a magic spell over me so that I immersed myself ever more in the gallery métier. In 1986, in a direct sequel to the gallery “Das Fen- ster”, my mother and I, together with a partner who unfortunately later died, opened the Samuelis Baum- ”Mine are not the years that time has taken from me mine are not the years that’re yet to awaken in me; the new-born moment is mine, one I will treasure, for so is mine what time and eternity will measure.“ Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664)

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