Ferociously painted in tones of black, blue and yellow, Flügel – Fingermalerei (Wing – Finger Painting) depicts perhaps the most significant symbolic motif of Georg Baselitz’s oeuvre: the eagle. Eagles have occupied a place of utmost importance in the artist’s career for over 40 years; while Baselitz dispels any political interpretation of, or narrative intent to his work, it is impossible for us not to see in these images a response to the aftermath of the Second World War. Painted in 1973, Flügel – Fingermalerei belongs to a preeminent body of work for which, in place of brushes or more conventional painterly tools, the artist used his hands and fingers to make marks and spread oil paint directly onto canvas. Today, examples from this corpus are housed in institutional collections across the globe and includes such extraordinary paintings as Eagle – Finger Painting (1972) at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich – a key work in Baselitz scholarship and exhibition history.

Executed with brute force and frenetic energy, the titular wing dominates the composition; its outstretched and inverted form here verges on total abstraction. Ever since the late 1960s, Baselitz has sought to liberate his subject matter by turning representational form upside down; in doing so, his paintings look to deflect immediate comprehension and steer the viewer towards the true form of their painterly marks, texture, and colour modulation. In this vein, Flügel – Fingermalerei pushes representational subject matter towards the very edges of pure abstraction, whilst at the same time exerting an intensely emotional and undeniably political evocation. When combined, as in the present work, these seemingly antithetical characteristics vividly illustrate Baselitz’s radical contribution to twentieth-century art history.



Born as Hans-Georg Kern, in Deutschbaselitz in East Germany in 1938, Baselitz grew up amongst the suffering and demolition of the Second World War. After moving to West Berlin in 1957, having been expelled from his art college in East Berlin for ‘socio-political immaturity’, Baselitz began developing his mature style as a painter. His work incorporated something of the German Expressionist style that had been denounced by the Nazis, whilst simultaneously evoking images of destruction and adopting contentious symbols of German identity – a bold move for a young artist whose country was longing to forget and rebuild. Following the artist’s breakthrough and highly controversial series of works, Big Night Down the Drain and the Hero paintings, in which lumbering tragic figures spoke of a national sense of loss and ruin, Baselitz began to incorporate the eagle as a central motif in his works of the early 1970s. As an allegorical symbol, the eagle has traditionally signified notions of strength, power and immortality for the German nation; and for Baselitz, who first painted an eagle aged 15, its evocative power ignited an abiding fascination. In the context of post-war Germany, however, Baselitz’s paintings of eagles, or its fragmented parts as in the present work, cannot help but evoke failing German Imperialism and the troubling misdeeds of the National Socialist Party.

Held in the early 1960s, the Nazi War trials in Jerusalem and Frankfurt saw Germany starkly confront the harrowing crimes of its recent past. Against this backdrop, Baselitz was among the most prominent contemporary German artists to address their country’s past transgressions; other artists who had adopted a similar stance were Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter, Jörg Immendorf, Markus Luepertz and Anselm Kiefer. Despite social impropriety, as evident in his scandal-inducing works of the late 1950s and ‘60s, Baselitz was not shy in creating works that seemed to respond directly to the devastation of war. Using expressions of alienation and ruin, his work exposes truths as opposed to hiding behind bland and politically neutral abstraction. Herein, the eagle represents a motif that is synonymous with German identity yet, owing to the Second World War, is somewhat tarnished and riddled with ambiguity. Akin to Baselitz, Richter also used eagles in his works to challenge his contemporary audience. Where Baselitz inverted the motif to neutralize its symbolic rhetoric, Richter achieved a similar sense of distance by blurring his photorealist paintings. By stripping his composition to a fragmented wing and inverting the image, Baselitz’s Flügel – Fingermalerei’s is complicated by abstraction and the way in which the viewer is forced to look for pictorial resolution; however, despite the artist’s equally important emphasis on revitalising the art of painting on canvas by inversion, Baselitz’s fragmented and pictorial disassembly of the eagle cannot help but invoke the drama of its symbolic fall from grace. Such a reading relates the present work to the aforementioned painting created one year previously and now held at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Finger Painting – Eagle (1972), in which a fully realised bird plummets in pathetic descent: the prideful bird of German supremacy falling towards the abyss. Another work that further outlines this reading is Fingermalerei - Schwarzer Akt (Finger painting – Black nude) (1973) here the artist not only paints a fragmented wing, he also conflates it with a nude self-portrait. Spread out under Baselitz’s half-raised arm, an allusion perhaps to the Roman salute made notorious at the hands of the Fascist political parties in Europe during World War II, the wing and self-representation form an intriguing coalition.

Baselitz’s invocation of the eagle picks up on a host of deeper art historical allusions that pre-date its corruption by the Third Reich. In Flügel – Fingermalerei we can see the artist channelling one of the forefathers of German art, Albrecht Dürer, specifically his Wing of a Blue Roller from 1512. Dürer’s emphasis on the fragmented wing and his intricate detailing of each individual feather and plume chimes with Baselitz’s ferocious mark-making whose upended style and thickly marked canvas has been re-worked with fervent detail. The development of Baselitz’s style during the 1970s involved varying degrees of abstraction and experimental approaches to painting that ranged from pictorial compression through to whole-scale disintegration. Vociferously denying any political meaning or narrative evocation, Baselitz places the emphasis primarily on the substance of paint, the process of its creation and its material qualities. As he has explained: “The pictures with deformed motifs led to abstract pictures. This in turn opened up the possibility of making an anti-picture, a picture without style” (G. Baselitz quoted in: D. Gretenkort, Ed., Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, London 2010, p. 50). The fact of the eagle’s repetition, however, and its obvious power as a symbol for Baselitz, seems to dispel the artist’s will to negate any direct allusion to history and narrative. Baselitz’s Eagle paintings represent the a cornerstone of his practice: depicted almost obsessively, either captured in its entirety, fragmented into its plumes or in combination with arresting self-portraits, these important works evince a conceptual and pictorial rigor that characterises the very best of Baselitz’s work.