Lot 231
  • 231

Georg Baselitz

Estimate
180,000 - 250,000 USD
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Description

  • Georg Baselitz
  • Night of the Nightingale IV (Oboznenko)
  • signed, titled and dated 6.17.98 on the reverse
  • oil on canvas
  • 78 1/2 by 63 1/2 in. 199.4 by 161.3 cm.

Provenance

Galerie Thaddeaus Ropac, Salzburg
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2008

Exhibited

Salzburg, Galerie Thaddeaus Ropac, Bucolica-The Contemporary Landscape, July - August 2006
Musée d’art moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole; Hamburg, Deichtorhallen, Georg Baselitz-Russenbilder, February 2007 - February 2008, pp. 46-47, illustrated in color

Condition

This work is in very good condition overall. The canvas is unlined. Upon close inspection, there is some scattered, fine debris within the painted surface, due to the artist's working method. There are a few pinpoint areas where the debris has come loose, resulting in a few minor areas of pinpoint pigment loss, only visible upon close inspection. Under Ultraviolet light inspection there is no evidence of restoration. Framed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Catalogue Note

Painted in 1998, Night of the Nightingale IV (Oboznenko) marks a pivotal moment in Baselitz’s body of work. Unlike his East German contemporaries, Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, Baselitz's attraction to an expressive figuration gained momentum through the sixties, seventies and eighties, and in 1998, the artist found himself at a critical balance between his abstraction and figuration. Known stylistically early in his career for powerfully incisive splashes of color, the rich physicality of broad and bold brushstrokes, and abstracted, inverted figures, Baselitz’s departure in the late nineties introduced a new phase of his work known as Russenbilder. The Russenbilder paintings are a reverential autobiographical series whose hazy, watery reflections allude to the political realities of the artist’s early childhood in East Berlin during the war, and his adolescence in West Berlin under the occupation of Soviet troops.

The "Nightingale" alluded to in the work's title is Baselitz's snide moniker for Joseph Stalin, a nickname given to the dictator because of his singing voice (he was a chorister as a boy) and love of poetry. Baselitz depicted an allegory for Lenin as well, who he dubbed "Mrs. Lenin," dressed in a skirt, making reference to his love of disguise. In this series, Baselitz goes beyond a surface distortion by adding a deeper layer, implementing a psychological perversion through the use of two dictators, who in the first half of the twentieth century caused the deaths of millions. Both characters are innocuously camouflaged by the artist’s choice of thick brushstrokes in bright colors and by creating a sense of compositional confusion. A decade after this painting was made, Baselitz produced Mrs. Lenin and the Nightingale, a suite of sixteen paintings pertaining to the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and depicting Baselitz’s famed compositional structure; his upside-down subjects. For Baselitz, “painting is methodically organized by an aggressive, dissonant reversal of the ornamentation." 

The present work confronts the viewer with a similar level of disorientation. In Night of the Nightingale IV (Oboznenko), Baselitz once again psychologically and structurally obscures his subjects through the use of childish expressions and light hues of red and yellow calling into question if they are in fact innocent children or merely disguised as such - much like Lenin and Stalin in Mrs. Lenin and the Nightingale. As the artist explained, "There are no ideals today. I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I didn’t want to re-establish an order: I’d seen enough of so-called order" (Georg Baselitz, quoted in "Goth to Dance: Georg Baselitz in Conversation with Donald Kuspit" in Detlev Gretenkort, Ed., Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, London 2010, p. 242). Amidst this destroyed order, destroyed landscape, destroyed people and destroyed society, comes a simplicity and sense of innocence.

With staccato brushstrokes, drips of ink and whitewashed translucent color, the monumental Russenbilder series also evokes a sense of melancholy not felt in Baselitz’s earlier Fracture and Hero paintings. Through this body of work, Baselitz attempts to revive forgotten moments and anecdotes, an artistic and folkloric testament to a bygone era, confronting historic realities: "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 the 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 Exh. Cat., Royal Academy of Arts, Baselitz, London 2007, p. 15).