The Baron of Boulder
Drawing on a storied life, Wulf Barsch practices the art of living well
Story and photo by Astrid Turner
As a child, he survived on his wits alone in postwar Germany. As a teenager, he dreamed of being a cowboy in America’s Wild West while he studied Bauhaus art. And in his early 30s, he won one of the most coveted painting prizes in the United States, the American Academy in Rome fellowship.
Now, Wulf Barsch is a celebrated contemporary painter, art professor, and sustainable-lifestyle farmer in a remote area of southern Utah. He believes God used geometry to design the universe, and he wants the earth to be better for him having been here.
As a father, he filled his twin sons’ lives with themes from his: survival, cowboys, and art. They became renaissance men, hunters, and craftsmen with the skills to withstand the sort of catastrophes, from world war to family breakdown, that their father endured.
He was born Baron Wulf von Benedikt, a descendant from a noble European family that saw its title stripped after World War I and its land annexed by the Nazis. For more than 900 years, the von Benedikt family was Bohemian nobility with a baronial title, large land holdings, and a castle on a mountain pass in the Alps. But by the end of the Second World War, they had lost everything, including ties with Barsch’s father, an artist, who was drafted into the German army shortly before Barsch was born in 1943. His parents lost contact, and each presumed the other was dead. Both later remarried (Barsch took his stepfather’s name).
The Russians crowded Barsch and his mother onto trucksbound for the refugee camps of Russian-occupied East Germany. He was 6 when he was dumped off the truck in the middle of the countryside with a handful of other children. “The Russians separated women and children, as well as men and women. It tore at the very heart and fabric of our lives,” he says now, reluctant to speak of those times.
He used any means he could to survive and still bears the scars of starvation. Finding his way to the mountains of Bavaria, he joined a canny gang of children who smuggled alcohol, cigarettes, and butter between American and Russian soldiers.
As he hid in fields, lying in the grass and staring up at the sky, he watched American planes delivering food and dreamed of living in the United States, where he’d heard people were free, food was plentiful, open space was abundant, and there was no threat of war.
He was reunited with his mother and sister when he was 10, and he started school. He escaped into the world of Karl May, a popular German author who romanticized the cowboy lifestyle in America’s Wild West, and dreamed of being a cowboy and having his own ranch.
When Barsch was 16 and on vacation in Bavaria, a well-dressed man in a Mercedes convertible pulled up to him at a gas station. There was recognition in the man’s face as he approached Barsch and asked his name. It was the first time that father and son met; Barsch learned his father had been a prisoner of war until 1952.
A deeply questioning mind and a creative sensibility led Barsch to study art. He learned from the master students of Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee, artists who emerged from the influential and iconic Bauhaus school in Germany.
“The Bauhaus school taught by skill, not by rhetoric. It was the 20th century’s most successful [art] school. Everyone became famous,” Barsch says.
He studied Egyptian and Islamic culture and history and was influenced by the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism and Hermetic philosophy. Spiritual and mystical themes emerged that still dominate his paintings. Barsch believes Galileo was right when he said, “Geometry is the application in which God created the universe.” Dynamic symmetry, a sacred form of geometry that underlies the order of nature and the proportions of the universe, is at the heart of Barsch’s designs. He is invited to speak on the subject all over the world. “There are 12 laws that govern art. Da Vinci worked by them. Not a thing he did wasn’t exact and measured. We are geometrically bound. Everything Degas did was measured, and early Christian pictures. I believe there are absolutes in beauty and truth,” Barsch says.
His beliefs about art mesh with a passionate spirituality. In the early 1960s, Barsch was a feisty intellectual art student when a Mormon missionary knocked on his door. He had argued with others and sent them packing (he says he found out later that two missionaries left the church after visiting him). But this one grabbed Barsch’s attention: He wore a cowboy belt and boots and impressed Barsch with tricks he’d mastered on the lasso he pulled from his briefcase.
They got to arguing about God, and the cowboy suggested that Barsch should read The Book of Mormon so he would know what he was arguing about. He did—and converted to Mormonism three days later.
After his own mission in California, Barsch, with master’s degrees in painting and printmaking, moved to Utah to teach art at Brigham Young University.
Winning the Rome Prize for visual arts in 1976 gave him a year to paint and study in Italy and set him on a career trajectory that has seen him described as one of America’s most significant religious painters, a figure who could lead a resurgence in contemporary art. His works are included in public and private collections across thecountry and internationally.
Barsch is deeply introspective, with a gentle, accented voice; a tall, slim frame; and an almost childlike earnestness in his blue eyes and furrowed brow. He says, “I teach so I can influence people, make them see.”
While he explored mystical questions of beauty and home in his paintings, Wulf Barsch searched the Wild West for that place of beauty where he could live out his cowboy dream.
His travels took him along Highway 12 in southern Utah, one of the most scenic drives in North America. As he approached Boulder, he looked down from the steep Hogsback Ridge to see bright green meadows circling white mesas ringed with pink sandstone crowns.
“I knew I was home,” he says.
He drove around, stopped a farmer, and asked if he could buy his farm. The man said no. But Barsch’s dream was persistent, and he returned many times before the farmer finally sold him 64 acres and Barsch moved his wife Sandra and their children to Boulder.
“There are people here who make it possible to believe. They nurture each other’s hope,” he says, referring to an eclectic Boulder community made up of Mormons, Buddhists, artists, yurt-living self-sufficient families, cattle ranchers, and tipi-dwelling survival-skills practitioners. Integrity, care, and devotion are the common threads binding them together.
“It was idyllic,” Wulf Barsch’s son Aram says of the childhood he and twin brother Joseph shared in one of the most remote regions in the lower 48 states. Dominated by Boulder Mountain, a vast wilderness plateau more than 11,000 feet in elevation, the community of Boulder overlooks the canyons and gorges of Capitol Reef National Park, the Henry Mountains, and the 1.7-million-acre Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
Later, Wulf Barsch and Sandra divorced. Now Barsch and his current wife, Kristen, together with Aram and Aram’s wife, Trina, run a small organic sustainable farm using virtually no machinery and limited electricity. (Joseph, a multitalented man who’s won awards as a ballroom dancer, moved away with his wife Jenna to work as an editor of a gun magazine.) They grow much of what they eat, canning, bottling, drying, and freezing what is not eaten fresh.
“I wanted to raise my children to be producers, not consumers, to live as lightly as possible on the earth,” Wulf Barsch says.
At the farm, draft horses plow fields and the family raises a small flock of Navajo-Churro sheep, mainly for the family’s own meat. “I have a hard time selling life,” Barsch says.
The life that barsch and extended family create on the farm is itself a vision of possibility. His son Aram, now 32, has no career, no money, and no Internet connection, but he can make saddles, guns, bows and arrows, and houses without nails.
He can hunt, skin animals, tan hides, play guitar, write poetry, and, if necessity dictated, keep his family alive well after the canned corn runs out and the rest of us have perished.
He and his brother learned how to make things from their father and his books. It was Bauhaus in Boulder: Form follows function, and everything is a work of art.
When the twins were teenagers, they built traditional muzzle-loaded black-powder rifles and exhibited them at hunting shows.
They learned to make saddles and harnesses from traditional craftsmen; Aram has made more than 20 saddles, mainly for working cowboys but also detailed, fancy saddles designed to order.
Though his father does not like to kill, Aram is a skilled hunter and marksman. He prefers the challenge of using a traditional longbow. Last fall, he won a once-in-a-lifetime tag to hunt buffalo with a bow in the Henry Mountains, one of only four places in North America with wild herds.
On a late autumn afternoon, Trina calls from the house for Aram to bring in some vegetables. He digs in the dirt and plops potatoes into a metal bucket. He moves to another furrow and pulls at feathery tops. He fills the bucket with beets, chard, broccoli, and spinach. Their 4-year-old daughter Cheyenne is wistful and angelic as she tiptoes around him, chattering.
In the orchard lie the carcasses of two freshly killed deer for the chickens to eat. A four-foot buffalo leg bone
with black hairy hoof lies next to the house. It’s for Daniel Boone, the black lab. Every being is well fed here.
Aram looks up across the field. The setting sun is pouring liquid gold over Sugarloaf mesa. It’s so brilliant that it seems unnatural, or holy. The family’s barn is awash with color. Hand-built by the twins and their father, it’s a 35-by-70-foot icon to traditional building skills and design. Wulf Barsch designed the timber post-and-rail structure based on traditions in Amish architecture and the Bavarian barns of his homeland.
At dinner in Aram’s hand-built log cabin, the family bows heads, and even 2-year-old Ivan folds his arms to say a prayer of thanks for a wholesome and unadorned meal of wild buffalo filets and baked vegetables.
On the other side of the farm, in Wulf Barsch’s attic studio, a blank canvas sits on an easel. Fat tubes of paint are lined in neat rows. A worn old monkey hand puppet stares out blankly from its perch on the end of some brushes.
Barsch reaches over to it, lifts the toy into his lap, and slides it onto his hand. His head bowed, he looks at it as
if it were a friend. For an almost indiscernible moment, he is the child lying in the field looking up at the sky, dreaming of possibilities.
“If you pack yourself away from the world, from people, threat, and give yourself open space and freedom, freedom from machinery and reliance on others … raise animals, grow crops, hunt, build, use your hands, your head, your heart, and your spirit, then you will always survive,” he says.
Australian writer Astrid Turner spent 2007 living and traveling in southern Utah, France, and Belgium, focusing on
cooking, writing, and finding her place in different communities. She made friends with Mormons, Mexicans, monks, bishops, 3-year-olds, cowboys, cooks, gardeners, writers, artists, servers, sailors, mothers, golfers, and dogs.
