Georg Baselitz

Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Cologne, Galerie Michael Werner, Georg Baselitz: Neue Arbeiten, November - December 1991

Exh. Cat., Bologna, Galleria D'Arte Moderna, Baselitz, 1997, pp. 114, 128-129, illustrated (studio and gallery view)

This work is in very good condition overall. There is evidence of wear and handling along the edge of the canvas. There is some scattered fine and stable craquelure in the thinly painted black areas. The center portion is heavily painted and there are no apparent losses. Framed.
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“Paintings securely hang on a hook, and whatever hangs down is a testimony to gravity. Whatever is depicted on such a painting, especially if it is upside down on it, doesn’t hit the ground, it is just more visible and hits the eye.” Georg Baselitz, Imperia, July 25, 2000. (Baselitz, Im Walde von Blainville, Malerei 1996-2000).

A product of both East and West Germany, Georg Baselitz’s art confronts Germany’s Post-War legacy and seeks to reconnect a German present to an unassailable heritage. Over the course of his career, Baselitz has sought to establish a new artistic and historical identity for Germany. A child during World War II, Baselitz immediately positioned himself as an outsider to then-current artistic movements practiced in both West and East Germany, such as social realism and what he considered the ineffectual abstraction of Tachisme.

Baselitz’s work in the early 1960s evoked German Expressionism and helped to reestablish the viability of figural painting through the use of disfiguration that was heavily influenced by Philip Guston and Francis Bacon.  During the mid-1960s Baselitz began to mine Germany’s history for archetypes that he used in his “Hero” paintings .  These (anti)heroes were one of the links to the past that could serve as tools for Baselitz to address Germany’s recent history.

After the reunification of Germany in 1990, Baselitz readdressed the Heroes motif with his mature practice, which now included painting canvases situated on the floor of his studio. In Das Letzte Römerpaar, absent is painterly craftsmanship of the original series in favor of dynamic paint handling, fluid brush strokes and a clear immediacy in its application enabled by this arrangement. Similarly gone is the traditional figure-and-ground relationship in favor of overall flatness and a focus on the autonomy of the canvas. The black sea of paint threatens to engulf the figures and directs the observer’s vision towards the center while the aggressive brushstrokes activate the entire surface of the painting. Baselitz’s pictorial invention draws the eye to the core of the image and heightens this dramatic vision.

The reversal of the central figures, a motif Baselitz used regularly since 1969, serves to unify the image and the canvas’ surface. The “story” of Das Letzte Römerpaar is subverted and the figures read as the intersection of form and color. Through this upside-down motif, Baselitz avoids problematic aspects of pure abstraction and tempers the dominance of the subject matter. Inversion heightens the observers’ optical reception as they seek to resolve the incongruity and realign visual clues. In effect, Baselitz creates his own form of abstraction through the reversal. The two Romans here are both legible to the observer yet Baselitz has drained them of their obvious narrative power and the symbolic weight of their forerunners, but heightens their impact on the viewer’s subconscious.