Angelica Bäumer

Angelica Bäumer (13 January 1932 – 18 July 2025) was an Austrian art critic, art historian, and exhibition curator who specialised in Art Brut and photography. She was also a survivor of the Holocaust.

Early life and family Bäumer was born on 13 January 1932 in Frankfurt, Hesse. Her father was the German painter Eduard Bäumer [ de]. Her mother Valerie Bäumer came from a Jewish Viennese family of manufacturers.

Bäumer was the eldest of three children in her family.

Bäumer's fathers painting were considered "degenerate art" by Nazi Germans Her maternal grandmother, Ida Feix, was deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, Poland. They sheltered in Grossarl, with false identities, and Bäumer's father painted a ceiling fresco in Linsinger's church. After the war, the family returned to Salzburg, including for the Witness of Our Time series.

Bäumer married urban planner and architecture critic Paulhans Peters.

From 1971, worked for the Austrian national broadcaster Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF), In 1984, she became secretary to the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) politician and then Minister of Education Herbert Moritz [ de]. She also wrote about Austrian artists including Soshana Afroyim, Otto Mauer [ de], Herbert Stejskal, and Irma Rafaela Toledo [ de], as well as the Austrian photographer Erich Lessing.

As a curator, Bäumer exhibited with Harald Gfader [ de] and Robert Kabas. She was commissioner of Biennial art festivals in Sydney (1988) and Puerto Rico (1993, 1995 and 1997).

In the 1990s, Bäumer was chairwoman and managing director of the Lower Austrian Cultural Forum, a member of the Lower Austrian Cultural Senate. She was also head of the Austrian editorial team of the German art magazine "neue bildende kunst." (a UNESCO NGO based in Paris, France) and was President of the Friends' Association for the Vienna Künstlerhaus.

Bäumer died on 18 July 2025 in Austria, aged 93.