George Baselitz’s 2 Pappeln from September 1975 is a majestic woodland landscape, executed at a seminal point in Baselitz’s prolific oeuvre. Painted in the same year that Baselitz was invited to represent Germany at the XIII Bienal de São Paolo, the present work is an outstanding example of Baselitz’s landscape paintings of the 1970s. Acquired by Marcia and Stanley Gumberg in May 1987, the present work has remained in their collection for over 35 years. At first sight, this canvas appears abstract, and it is only upon closer inspection that the upside-down landscape of the two poplar trees appear. Set against streaks of yellow, blue and white and punctuated by traces of deep red, the two poplar trees occupy a central position, extending vertically throughout the entire length of the canvas. 2 Pappeln presents an impressive and gesturally articulated example of the artist’s investigation into the landscape genre.

Baselitz was born in the year preceding the outbreak of the Second World War, and he came of age in the shadow of the war’s horrific events. In the aftermath of such devastation, Baselitz grappled with his own national and artistic identity, and from such interrogations emerged a period of intense experimentation; The themes of German identity, history and collective memory have been central throughout Baselitz’s career. During the mid-1960s, Baselitz moved his family to the remote German countryside. Here, he created new archetypes based on traditional folklore imagery of woodlands, animals and huntsmen. One of Baselitz’s earliest artistic influences was Ferdinand von Rayski, who was introduced to him by his uncle: “My uncle [a pastor in Dresden]… showed me the museums in Dresden and told me about art history. He was the first to show me paintings by Gerdinand von Rayski.” (Georg Baselitz quoted in: Detlev Gretenkort, Ed., Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, London, 2010, p. 153) On the one hand, Rayski’s forests represent a naturalistic painterly tradition stretching back to the Nineteenth Century, which had been misappropriated by the National Socialists. At the same time, Rayski’s Saxon landscapes were a crystallisation of childhood places that became inaccessible to Baselitz following his move to West Berlin and the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961.

The present work takes the iconography of the forest, which has a particularly profound connotation in Germany, and turns it on its head. Like his paintings depicting the historically resonant Adler or eagle, standard of ancient Rome, infamous emblem of the Nazi party and archetype in the writings of Carl Jung, the forest is an equally potent symbol which is strongly affiliated with Germanic folklore and the cultural memory of the people. As the German writer Elias Canetti observed: “Not in any modern nation in the world has the spirit of identification with the forest [Waldgefühl] remained so vital.” (E. Canetti quoted in Exh. Cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts, Georg Baselitz, Septemner - December 2007, p. 121) In 2 Pappeln, Baselitz pointedly subverts the forest's symbolic power as signifier for the German nation. At the same time, the painted imagery is also strongly personal, evoking his own nostalgia for his Saxon homeland in East Germany. Trees are also an important trope in Baselitz's Hero paintings, standing for the nation as they bleed out of their patched up barks.

As the foremost champion of Neo-Expressionist painting in the 1970s, Baselitz employed gesture, colour, and materiality to imbue in his works a new sense of rawness, directedness and textural dimension. As noted by Richard Schiff, “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: Exh. Cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts, Baselitz, 2007, p. 27)

Beginning in 1969, the inversion of the image became the most signature touchstone of Basetliz’s practice and a strategy that he would continue to employ to great critical acclaim over the next decades. In the present work, Baselitz breaks the traditional rules of pictorial perspective by inverting the forest, developing an alternative mode of representation by distorting the landscape through the orientation on the canvas, forcing the viewer to accept the inverted view and thereby shocking our expectations. As he wrote on the process of liberating literal interpretation from form: “If you stop fabricating motifs but still want to carry on painting, then inverting the motif is the obvious thing to do. The hierarchy which has the sky at the top and the earth at the bottom is, in any case, only a convention. We have got used to it, but we don’t have to believe in it… What I wanted was quite simply to find a way of making pictures, perhaps with a new sense of detachment.” (Georg Baselitz in conversation with Peter Moritz Pickshaus, in: Franz Dahlem, Georg Baselitz, Cologne 1990, p. 29) The highly gestural painterly style of the present work borders on the abstract, with its inverted composition adding a further layer of perspectival complexity. An immaculate example of Baselitz's inverted landscape, 2 Pappeln is an outstanding work encompassing the central themes and style of the artist's pioneering oeuvre.