Georg Baselitz

Private Collection, Berlin

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There are artist's pinholes in all four corners and at the top centre overturned edge. There is a very small scuff along the extreme upper left overturned edge. There is a very thin band of canvas lining visible along the extreme bottom edge which is original to the work. No restoration is apparent under ultra-violet light.
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"Standing within a long tradition of German art, and using time-honoured media, Baselitz has striven constantly to confront the realities of history and art history, to make them new and fresh in a manner that can only be described as heroic; heroic because his art has consciously gone against the grain of fashion, while always remaining modern"  Norman Rosenthal, 'Why the Painter Georg Baselitz is a Good Painter' in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, Baselitz, 2007, p. 15

 

Painted in 1967, Georg Baselitz's Untitled (Waldarbeiter/ Woodman) is a fascinating work which documents the evolution of ideas and style at a crucial phase in the artist's early development. Depicting a bare-footed woodchopper, dressed in pseudo-militaristic attire and wielding an axe, it is in part a continuation of the seminal and highly acclaimed 'Hero Paintings' or New Types made between 1965-66; at the same time, however, the dislocation of the image, the dismembered and reconfigured body parts, herald the dawn of a new and important development in Baselitz's work, the so-called Frakturbilder or Fracture paintings.

 

The figure of the woodchopper reminds us of the Heroes, but without the overt references to Germany's military past. In the earlier series Baselitz had brazenly confronted head-on the vanquished heroes of his nation's Nazi past. Tapping into the existentialist angst of the period, Baselitz created the epic figure of the wanderer, the uprooted sufferer of modern life. In the present work, this symbol of post-war German identity is replaced by a new class of hero, one which is proletarian, agricultural and regenerative. The figure's stature, enlarged hands and muscular forearm remind us of the Heroes, yet here the tone of the landscape is more pastoral than Apocalyptic. In 1966, after the birth of his second child, Baselitz moved from Berlin to the country, to a large peasant house in Osthofen, a market village in the Rhineland Palatinate in the southwest of Germany. Responding to his new environment, rural themes - woodsmen, huntsmen and animals - started to play a more significant role in his art.

 

As Norman Rosenthal explains, after the Hero Paintings "A need for a new chapter had arisen and this was to find form in the so-called 'Fracture' paintings. These represent a new form of Cubism with German content and colour symbolism, as an answer to the target and number paintings of Jasper Johns that engage in an American way with the classical Cubism of Picasso and Braque" (Norman Rosenthal, 'Why the Painter Georg Baselitz is a Good Painter' in: Exhibition Catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, Baselitz, 2007, p. 17).

 

This important stylistic innovation finds one of its earliest outlets in the present work. Throughout his career, Baselitz has always insisted on the importance of figurative painting, addressing what it means to be German instead of hiding behind what he deemed to be bland abstraction which avoided societal and psychological imperatives. In the 1960s, he was almost alone in a world dominated by abstraction and the beginnings of conceptual art. In West Germany, the revolutionising influence of Joseph Beuys was gaining ascent and the challenge for Baselitz was to find a way to break loose from the subject and yet remain true to himself as an artist and especially as a painter. Here we see his first tentative steps in the Frakturbilder, a corpus of work which would occupy him until the end of the decade. In the present work, figuration and coherence of pictorial depth are interrupted by the jarring dislocations of space. The head is severed from the neck, the hands disjointed and most noticeably the feet are autonomous and separated from the legless trunk. In their severed state and pallor, the feet are reminiscent of the series of canvases P.D. Feet painted between 1960-63, in which Baselitz depicted body fragments misshapen and suspended against murky backgrounds. As a visual analogue, segments of the logged tree trunk hover in mid air, separated by a horizontal fracture that splits the picture plane just above the low horizon line. Symbolically, the tree, icon of German Romanticism, has been felled by an artist engaging with his art historical past. In the immediate foreground, the depiction of an axe serves as a metaphor for the artistic violence that has occurred.

 

On a formal level, this fracturing process asserts the autonomy of the picture over content and shows Baselitz's response to the flag paintings of Jasper Johns, where nationalist symbols are disrupted by collage, variegated mark-making and surface. Another contemporaneous painting of a fractured woodsman, B for Larry, is titled in a tribute to Johns (who Baselitz mistakes for Larry Rivers whose work he saw simultaneously). As with Johns, in Baselitz's work the strategies for 'destroying' the coherence of the subject are nonetheless underpinned by a vigorous engagement with the tradition of draughtsmanship, instilled in Baselitz as a young art student in East Germany.

 

At the same time, the Frakturbilder are also an endorsement of the visual culture of madness as an anti-authoritarian stance. Ever since a formative trip to Paris in 1961, where Baselitz experienced first hand the outsider art of Jean Fautrier, Henri Michaux and the writer and arch-existentialist Antonin Artaud, he was fascinated by the freedom of expression engendered by psychotic art. Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty - an attack on bourgeois theatre through the spectacle of shock and bodily contortion - was profoundly influential on Baselitz's work throughout the 1960s. In the Frakturbilder, the butchered image shows Baselitz's stylistic internalisation of the theoretical implications of Artaud's theatre. With their shocking spatial dislocations, the Frakturbilder present a new form of painting which is neither wholly figurative nor abstract, in which the subject - but not the inherent social value of art - is ruptured by the device of free abstraction. Carving his own direction from between poles of abstraction and figuration, east and west, the Frakturbilder are a crucial staging post in Baselitz's independent artistic journey.