GEORG BASELITZ | Große Nacht im Eimer

Galerie Friedrich & Dahlem, Munich Acquired from the above by the father of the present owner in the late 1960s

Leverkusen, Städtisches Museum; Hamburg, Kunsthaus Hamburg; Munich, Kunstverein München, Zeichnungen: Baselitz, Beuys, Buthe, Darboven, Erber, Palermo, Polke, Richter, Rot, June - September 1970, p. 20, illustrated
Frankfurt, Städtische Galerie im Städelschen Kunstinstitut, Georg Baselitz: Zeichnungen, Bilder, Skulpturen, May - August 1988, p. 103, illustrated
Berlin, Tschechischen Zentrum, Beauties and Beasts: Making and Collecting Art in Germany, April 2018, p. 117, no. 56, illustrated in colour

Colour: The colour in the catalogue illustration is fairly accurate. Condition: Please refer to the department for a professional condition report.
"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. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

"My first painting, my first attempt at painting, was The Big Night Down the Drain." Georg Baselitz, 17 January 2007, cited in: Exh. Cat., London, Royal Academy of Arts, Baselitz, 2007, p. 13.


Against an impervious and threatening darkness, a pale and knotted figure confronts the viewer. With genitals exposed and limbs deformed, he is unashamed and contemptuous, forsaken and tragic. Created in 1963, the present work on paper belongs to the most controversial and radical works of Baselitz’s career: Die Grosse Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain). Comprising a body of three major paintings dated between 1962 and 1963 (two of which are held in private collections and the other in the collection of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne), and important works on paper including those held in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, this corpus signalled the arrival of a bold new artistic talent unafraid to tackle the unmentional taboo of Germany’s recent past. Executed shortly after the construction of the Berlin Wall, the present work and its counterparts instigated a new era in the art of Georg Baselitz and can be regarded as the very root and source of his entire subsequent canon.

In 1962 a twenty four year-old Georg Baselitz, working in conditions of considerable destitution in West Berlin, began a new body of work. For the artist, the primary purpose of these paintings and drawings was to represent the ultimate provocation. The distinguished art historian Andreas Franzke has explained that with Die Grosse Nacht im Eimer "Baselitz achieves a monumental quality, an apotheosis of brute instinct, with a ruthless determination that could hardly fail to send a tremor through the art scene as constituted in 1963. Indeed, the work has lost none of its aggressive impact to this very day" (Andreas Franzke and Edward Quinn (idea and concept), Georg Baselitz, Munich 1989, p. 21). Since coming into being almost half a century ago, the Die Grosse Nacht im Eimer paintings and works on paper have provoked controversy and outrage. The large painting now in the collection of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, was the centrepiece of Baselitz's first solo exhibition, which opened on 1st October 1963 at the inauguration of the new West Berlin gallery of Michael Werner and Benjamin Katz. Once unveiled, these works elicited a stunned reaction of near-disbelief: "Alarmed, horrified and shocked, the invited guests, among them Berlin's Senator for Science and Art, Arndt, stood before the scandalous oil-paintings of Georg Baselitz...Whispering groups of smartly dressed people jostled past the fifty-two obscene oil-paintings, watercolours and drawings... bewildered or disgusted by so many horrors" (German Press Agency Report, 2 October 1963, cited in: Martin G. Buttig, ‘Baselitz  Case’, Censorship, Vol. 2, No. 1, Winter 1966, p. 36). Three days after the opening, the critic of Der Tagesspiegel, Heinz Ohff, reported that on account of their ‘obscene’ nature, Die Grosse Nacht im Eimer and another work, Der nackte Mann, had been confiscated by order of the Director of Public Prosecutions. The newspaper attacked the draconian censorship, citing the West German constitution's stipulations on freedom of speech and its penal code's definition of what comprised an ‘infringement of public morality’. However, despite nineteen other newspapers also reporting the supposed action, the two paintings had in fact not been confiscated. Nevertheless, the stories became a self-fulfilling prophecy when the exhibition was eventually raided by the police on 9^th October and the pictures were taken: the West German authorities maintaining that the threat to public morality overshadowed an individual's right to freedom of expression. The eventual confiscation led to a prolonged legal dispute and on 30 June 1964, Baselitz, Werner and Katz were convicted of ‘jointly exhibiting obscene pictures’ and each fined 400 Deutschmarks.

In Die Grosse Nacht im Eimer the pent-up anger, shame, disappointment and distress of a nation found its painful articulation. These paintings and works on paper utterly encapsulate the ruthless determination of an artist unafraid of taking on the most difficult and challenging subject ever to warrant an artistic response, and as such, should be considered a paradigm in the history of twentieth-century art.