to travel to Switzerland, Italy, and France. In the same year, his daughter Felicitas was born. In 1936 he was introduced by the Wuppertaler architect Heinz Rasch, with whom he work during the 1924 Exhibition in Stuttgart, to Dr. Kurt Herberts, the owner of a varnish factory in Wuppertal. He began working for the company in 1937, joining other artists ostracized by the National Socialist regime: Franz Krause, Alfred Lörcher, Georg Muche, and Oskar Schlemmer, and the art historian Hans Hildebrandt. That year five of his works were shown in the National Socialist exhibition Entartete Kunst (Degenerate art) in Munich. Until 1941, when a ban on his paintings and exhibitions was issued by the National Arts Chamber, Baumeister still had many opportunities to exhibit his works abroad in Europe. Despite the prohibition and the constant surveillance, he still worked at the Herberts varnish factory, as well as on his art. In 1943, when a bomb attack rendered Wuppertal as well as Baumeister’s house in Stuttgart uninhabitable, he moved with his family to Urach in the Swabian Alps. In 1945, after the end of the Second World War, Baumeister completed his book Das Unbekannte in der Kunst (The Unknown in Art), which was only published in 1947, even though he had completed the manuscript in 1943–44. In 1946 he received the position to teach a class in decorative paintings at the Stuttgart Academy of Arts and in 1947 resumed his exhibition activities. In 1949 he became the co-founder of the artist group Gegenstandlose (The Group of Nonrepresentational Artists), which threw its first exhibition called ZEN 49 in 1950. Here Baumeister met Fritz Winter, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Paul Fontaine, and many others who worked in the field of fine arts after the end of the war and the dictatorship in Germany to forge a new beginning and connection to international developments. In his participation in the Erstes Darmstädter Gespräch (First Darmstadt Dialogue) in July 1950, at the exhibition Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit (The Human Image of Our Time), Baumeister defended modern art against Hans Sedlmayr's thesis of a "loss of the center" ("Verlust der Mitte"). Until his death in 1955, Baumeister stood at the peak of his artistic career, which was demonstrated by his participation in many national and international exhibitions such as the Venice Biennale in 1948, the São Paulo Biennale (Brazil) in 1951 (where he received a prize for