Georg Baselitz can no longer be summed up by labels such as provocateur, nonconformist or angry. In six decades of versatile, almost Herculean creative power, the painter and sculptor has long since evolved from a young rebel in the German art scene to a recognized old master. Honored by numerous museum exhibitions - the last major retrospective took place in 2018 on the occasion of his 80th birthday in the Swiss Fondation Beyeler - Baselitz belongs to the internationally collected establishment. France also recently gave the German the final artistic endorsement, giving the Francophile Baselitz a seat at the august Academy of Fine Arts under the dome of the Institut de France.
This award is accompanied by an extensive retrospective organized by curator Bernard Blistène, in close collaboration with the artist himself. In about one hundred exhibits, it shows a complete overview with key works from all creative periods, primarily paintings, but also sculptures, drawings and lithographs. In the Pompidou, Baselitz's long path can be traced with ever new work phases and cycles from the 1960s to the present day. It is the path of an artist who has anchored himself in art history, to which he repeatedly refers, and from this position has intensively dealt with the materiality, with the physical dimension of his work.
At the beginning there is the angry provocation of the artistic gesture, which arose from the wound of one's own and collective experience.
Georg Baselitz was born in 1938 with the real name Hans-Georg Kern in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony.
His father was a convinced National Socialist.
A quote preceding the exhibition gives the key to Baselitz' work: “I was born into a destroyed order, into a destroyed landscape, into a destroyed society.
And I didn't want to introduce a new order (...).
I was forced to question everything (...).” In 1957, the young painter defected to the West and discovered artists such as Jean Dubuffet and Antonin Artaud or the extreme visual language of the works of Art Brut, which corresponded to his sensibilities and broke new ground in the show artistic expression.
Hitler processing
Even today, the first exhibition hall in the Pompidou is still felt like a punch in the stomach. The paintings from the early 1960s hang here in their brownish, greyish, greenish or fleshy reddish tones, which were thrown onto the canvas in an angry, unclean painting gesture. “The Naked Man” lies masturbating on a reddish-brown bed like an agitated body. The well-known scandalous picture "The Big Night in the Bucket" shows a Hitler-like male with a distorted face who is working on his oversized penis. When it was shown in 1963, the painting was confiscated by the vice squad and a trial ensued. For him, the road to fame is paved with declarations of war against the repressing post-war Germany and the primarily abstract artistic mainstream.In 1969, turning his paintings upside down brought renewed attention. A heated debate arose again when in 1980 at the Venice Biennale he decorated the German pavilion with its Nazi architecture with the roughly hewn "model for a sculpture" showing a reclining man with his arm raised. The position was copied from African tribal art - it has a great influence on his work - but was given an unmistakable message in the context.The position was copied from African tribal art - it has a great influence on his work - but was given an unmistakable message in the context.The position was copied from African tribal art - it has a great influence on his work - but was given an unmistakable message in the context.
At all times, as the Paris exhibition makes it possible to experience, his works in their polished, only seemingly raw state have an enchanting energy and presence and focus on the body: not as an attempt at realistic representation, but as one transferred to painting or sculpture Experience of a physical and emotional reality. Baselitz' bodies are portents of a catastrophic world. As early as the 1960s, even before he methodically turned his pictures upside down, he painted bulky, tattered "heroes" who embody a disaster in the large format of the history painting. One of his "hero pictures" is dedicated to Gustave Courbet, who is artistically related. Courbet is also the master's master in the landscape paintings that are turned upside down and in some of the finger paintings that the show shows.All his life, Baselitz worked beyond all currents of his time, whether abstraction, pop art or conceptual art. With the stroke of genius with which he turned a painting over for the first time in 1969 and thereby radically alienated not only the view of what is depicted, but also of the brushwork, he escaped both conventions and the artistic dead end. He opened a breach in the trench warfare between figuration and abstraction.He opened a breach in the trench warfare between figuration and abstraction.He opened a breach in the trench warfare between figuration and abstraction.
A separate room brings together for the first time a fascinating group of works from the 1980s that deal with Munch's self-portraits and his "Scream". In another room, three of the hieratic, sulphurous-yellow heads from the “Dresden Women” (1990) series of sculptures, which materialize the experience of destruction in maltreating indentations, are surrounded by almost abstract large-scale formats from the “Bildübereins” series, in which the layers of paint are like accumulations of memories that have become physical overlay. In the past decade it has mainly been aging bodies that float upside down, almost trembling, in a deep pictorial space. These figures – the artist paints himself and the woman of his life, Elke – are thrown back into their defenseless corporeality and at the same time transcend their existence.
George Baselitz. The Retrospective
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At the Center Pompidou, Paris;
until March 7th.
The catalog costs 45 euros.