格奧爾格‧巴塞利茲

Galerie Heiner Friedrich, Munich

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1977

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although there are more green undertones in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are a couple of small losses to the top and left edges, with associated paint losses. Close inspection reveals a short hairline crack towards the centre of the left edge and some minor paint lifting approximately 7 cm from the centre of the bottom edge. Inspection under ultra violet light reveals a small line of retouching towards the left of the lower edge.
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Summoning a caustically muted vision of a symbolically charged landscape, Georg Baselitz’s expressionistic Zwei Kissen (Two Cushions) 1967, provides a unique vision of the artist’s key concerns at this point. Conceived after his important Heroes series and when he was creating his Fracture works, the piece substantiates a vital development in the artist’s oeuvre. Zwei Kissen bears a unique constitution peculiar to this period – between still-life, landscape and figuration –  that marks Baselitz’s identity as a lone provocateur distinctly separate from dominant contemporaneous trends: “I started to cut myself off from the others, completely shutting myself away, didn’t join in art circles and tried to develop pictures that would, yes, provoke” (Georg Baselitz, ‘Statement at the Press Conference for ‘Baselitz Remix’ at the Albertina, Vienna, 17 January 2007’, in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, Baselitz, 2007, p. 11). Having left behind the aesthetic dogma of Socialist Realism with his flight from East Germany in 1958, Baselitz remained unsatisfied by the pretensions of freedom purported by fashionable movements such as Abstract Expressionism, Tachisme and Nouveau Réalisme. In a domestic cultural landscape still scarred by the war, Zwei Kissen sees Baselitz inaugurating an interest in pastoral lands and folkloric symbolism in a quest to re-access German values.

The presence of the eponymous cushion dominates the foreground. Precariously balanced on wooden sticks rooted in a rugged and muddy earth, Baselitz imbues this most mundane of objects with significant emotive weight. The arrangement bears a sense of struggle and effort, even sardonic melancholy, enacted by the interaction between his esoteric signs. The still life tableau soon gives way to a fragmented landscape littered with ambiguous, at times anthropomorphised, forms which produce a scene caught between partially articulated reality and unsettled dream.

A deified vision of a head floats amongst a set of playfully demarcated clouds that toy with the abstract without fully entering into it. This silo head speaks to themes of disembodiment that Baselitz was exploring with previous studies of dismembered limbs and mutilated figures. But its apotheosised state, scattered with crucifix apparitions, brings fourth the presence of the artist himself as master creator of this impassioned realm. It marks a movement towards Baselitz’s propensity to use the canvas as an exploratory self-portrait. The marrying of the head and pillow, as implying rest or unrest, is something Baselitz returned to in his 1987 work Kopfkissen now in the collection of the National Gallery of Scotland. In line with other works from this period, the crosses are also semantic imperatives. As echoes scattered over the ruinous vista, these recall the stone crosses Baselitz encountered as gravestones, abundant during his childhood. The cross was also a powerful preoccupation of perhaps the greatest German artist of the preceding generation, Joseph Beuys, who was fascinated in the iconographic power of this evocative symbol.  

The palette Baselitz uses in Zwei Kissen remains muddy and sullen, his brushstrokes typically arrhythmic and anarchic in their sense of demarcation. As Richard Schiff notes, there is a purposefully engrained sense of friction within the formal constitution of brushstrokes: “Baselitz never allowed his marks to become calligraphy, that is, to become beautiful in themselves. Each attains its own ugliness by becoming a bit too big... Oversized, coarsened, each pulls apart from its neighbour even when it is part of a decorative pattern, resulting in pockets of local disharmony” (Richard Schiff, ‘Feet too Big’, in: ibid., p. 27). The work embodies a key aesthetic moment in Baselitz’s career in line with the development of his fracture paintings: a dramatic series of formal experiments in which the artist enacted visual schisms across the picture plane, disrupting the logic of the lucid image. The piece also builds thematically on the groundwork laid in Baselitz's iconic Helden (Heroes). The desolate and emotionally charged landscape of Zwei Kissen recalls the barren wasteland in which Baselitz's ‘Heroes’ wander. Both nostalgic and progressive, the work thus stands as an essential component in the aesthetic journey of one of Germany’s greatest post-war artists.