Georg Baselitz

Galerie Neuendorf, Hamburg
Sonnabend Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Eindhoven, Van Abbemuseum, Georg Baselitz - Bilder 1977-1978, 1979, no. 17, illustrated in colour
Düsseldorf, Kunsthalle, Georg Baselitz, 1981, n.p., illustrated
Akron, Ohio, Akron Art Museum, Georg Baselitz, 1983

Detlev Gretenkort, Ed., Georg Baselitz - Paintings 1962-2001, Milan 2002, pp. 100-01, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the pink tones are slightly deeper in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is a minor paint chips to the extreme centre left edge and another to the extreme tip of the bottom left corner of the left panel, and another to the extreme lower left edge of the right panel. There is minor rubbing to the tip of the extreme bottom right corner and a minor vertical paint crack in the lower right quadrant of the head. No restoration is apparent under ultraviolet light.
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One of the grandest portraits of the artist's wife, Elke, ever to come to auction, Baselitz's dynamic Gruppe #11, Rote Elke und Flasche is monumental diptych depicting the classic still-life motif of the bottle and his beloved partner in a passionate scheme of colour.  The Dresden-born Elke Kretzschmar, whom Baselitz married in 1962, was to become such a focus in his oeuvre that in 1997 the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas staged a romantic retrospective dedicated solely to these celebrated portraits, Georg Baselitz: Portraits of Elke that was to tour around the United States and Mexico. In these portraits, Baselitz challenged himself to suppress any emotional content inspired by his model and instead focused his attention on conveying pure visual structure in paint. It was this desire to use traditional and recognizable subject matter to explore painterly abstraction that led Baselitz to paint his subjects upside-down.  The combination of the inverted images - portrait and bottle- and the vibrant hues of red combined with the artist's ferocious brushstroke create a mood for Baselitz's Gruppe #11, Rote Elke und Flasche.  Executed in 1978, this diptych is an example of Baselitz's matured expressionist style, and it was within this time period that he began to paint large scale pieces on panels of plywood, often fashioned in two parts.

Working largely from photographs of a posed Elke, Baselitz paints upside-down while looking at his source right-side up, sometimes painting with his feet.  He did not attempt to create portraits that pretended to describe his wife, a woman of substantial beauty and an accomplished designer, stating that "I don't illustrate Elke.  I try to remove her, but I usually can't... You can lose the model, but you don't lose the subject... It's complicated.  I begin with an idea, but as I work, the picture takes over.  Then there is the struggle between the idea I preconceived... and the picture that fights for its own life" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Fort Worth, Modern Art Museum, Georg Baselitz: Portraits of Elke, 1997).  Preceding Baselitz's 1981 series of inverted portraits that incorporate the object of the bottle - Flaschentrinker (Bottle Drinker), Glastrinker (Glass Drinker), and Trinker und Flasche (Drinker and Bottle) - Gruppe # 11, Rote Elke und Flasche is an early exploration of this theme, merging the figurative with an object generally reserved for traditional still-life painting.  Through his rigorous process of abstraction in Gruppe #11, Rote Elke und Flasche, Baselitz constructs a personal script, a "restless script" in which he forces the audience to enter his world of fierce expression (Andreas Franzke, Baselitz, Munich 1989, p.140).

In 1969 Baselitz challenged the artistic status-quo by turning his depictions upside down and as Franzke notes, "by doing so he compelled the viewer to pay attention not only to the content - [...] - but also and primarily to painterly values" (Franzke, opcit., p.111).  The inversion of the image causes a loss in recognition since the unusual orientation conflicts with reality and appears almost abstract. A decade later in Gruppe #11, Rote Elke und Flasche, the reversed image is still present, liberating the representation from its content.  Baselitz, however, has taken this 'liberation' a few steps further- while in the early 70s his paintings' subjects were clearly recognizable, this 1978 depiction is barely discernible with its emotionally-charged brushwork and loose abstract composition conveying an undeniable fervour for his subject.