Excerpt from the essay
BASELITZ AS PAINTER, BASELITZ AS ART LOVER
Eric Darragon
[...]
In some critics, especially the few that have followed him since his first
steps - there were several of these steps and the artist has come to the
point of reworking them - there is a stronger attention towards the single
work, the one located at the intersection of numerous others, which are
equally unpredictable, untamed, caught in the development of variations
whose breadth is constantly discovered by the artist. The sense and function
of the variation were really reinvented from the very outset, so to speak,
with the Rayski-Köpfe (p. 161), for example. However, over the years, with
all the implied mutations and relations, this dynamics - aimless, disrupted,
regained, transformed, with no limit other than the one which attracts,
which makes people turn their heads to see - became the expressive form par
excellence. There is no music and no "musicalism", but only music and sound
offer such possibilities. More dissonance than melody perhaps, but never
arrogance with respect to the refrain. As a result, in both quantitative and
qualitative terms, Baselitz's universe is not composed only of a
considerable corpus of documents that make him one of the most productive
artists of his generation, but also one of the most attentive to everything
capable of enhancing his desire to see and understand.
Above all, this universe has remained the one whereby he has succeeded in
establishing himself through a very narrow passageway, an open process that
never ceases to extend and reformulate itself. At each significant point,
the artist reconsiders the whole and uses the motif as a function of his
thought. His painting has never allowed itself to be restrained by a drive
for style or even the idea of the picture. A whole strategy has been
employed to fight against this idea. A different formalism has been brought
into play, a different mode of figuration.
[...]
Excerpt from the essay
GEORG BASELITZ: BACKWARD, FORWARD, UPSIDE DOWN, EVERYWHERE, IN THE PAINTING
Bruno Corā
After spending about three years on oil paintings intended to destructure
the organicity of the figure and shatter its integrity, Georg Baselitz
decided to turn the painted subject upside-down once and for all, starting
in 1969 with a tree - Der Wald auf dem Kopf (p. 162) - and then a series of
portraits of friends, including Ralph W. Penck. This gesture is one of those
that have an indelible impact not only on the life of the painter but also
on the history of art.
[...]
The subversive event of the inversion of the image involved an emotional
charge of a very different nature from the one that had previously
distinguished Baselitz's pictorial work. An unprecedented firmness can be
perceived in those new works as well as a simultaneously calm and abnormal
enunciative approach typical of someone who has made a real leap forward and
entered a different expressive dimension.
[...]
Baselitz must have undergone a crucial awakening for an artist long in
search of a way out of the impasse of the figurative painting that had
exhausted every possibility of redeeming the figure in the post-war period
after Francis Bacon and Willem de Kooning. And if he was to move beyond all
the existential angst culminating in the drama of Jackson Pollock, the only
open path was a spatial and linguistic solution.
[...]
And while the inversion of the image had an unquestionable revolutionary
impact on painting, triggering further changes in Baselitz's own work, in
the field of sculpture he replaced the Western viewpoint and conception with
the tribal approach, adopting techniques and morphologies that injected
astonishing new vigour into an art that had already seemed a "dead language"
to Arturo Martini as early as 1945 [...].
[...]
After 1995 his painting underwent an invasion of both pictorial modes and
iconographic programmes generated by memories of his personal history as
well as his family circle and friends.
Painting tells no story whatsoever but suggests and manifests itself with a
speed of execution akin to hypnagogic visions, seeking to give form and
space to images through phantasmal ephemerality and evanescences where the
lived experience of the gestures emerges, among the other signs, within the
very traces of the painting. Together with the barely sketched figures,
against backgrounds summarily defined by broad expanses of colour, the
canvases display rings left by cans of paint, splashes, drippings and
footprints indicative of the fact that Baselitz works on his paintings
spread out on the floor of the studio.
[...]
Though perceptibly different, the recently painted subjects are
characterised by the common denominator of a ductus that has more to do with
drawing than pictorial impasto. It is obvious that the images flow into the
mind of the painter, who pins them down, annotates them, photographs them
with the naked eye or, if you prefer, with a mind free of all
preoccupations, and pours them out instantaneously onto the canvas at a
speed enhanced by the use of highly diluted paint.
[...]
What distinguishes the painting of the last few years is also the
extraordinary freedom of the artist, now fully aware of his expressive means
and hence even more uninhibited in the adoption of morphologies or
associations between forms of representation that would be unthinkable for
other painters or difficult to handle in accordance with a current pictorial
syntax.
[...]
Baselitz also addresses the genres belonging to popular or exotic painting,
accentuating their already highly characteristic features [...].
[...] in various other works - often large-scale ones - of the last ten
years, it can be stated that Baselitz has broken new ground in the process
of deconstruction of the image and the painting itself by stripping them of
plasticity and working on the pictorial fabric to make it as light and
transparent as the ethereal consistency of the images that form in the state
between sleep and wakefulness [...]. Baselitz uses two devices in this
exercise of dissipation of the iconographic physicality. On the one hand, he
expands his pictorial "equipment" to include the modality of concise
representation of the sermo humilis with the "low" vocabulary of imagerie
populaire. On the other, he uses diluted colour and adopts the appearance
and schematic approach of the ninteenth-century Slavic glass paintings,
which animate an image devoid of chiaroscuro, with a unified vision charged
with dissonant but lively chromatic timbres, the result of an insouciance as
conscious as it is deliberately careless.
[...]
Excerpt from the essay
IMAGE AND PAINTING
Rainer Michael Mason
[...]
The work of Edvard Munch has accompanied Baselitz since a very early stage
and is still a source of questioning. As he stated in October 2005, when he
produced the Erinnerungsbilder, or souvenir pictures of his Remix series, a
sort of reworking of Baselitz by Baselitz, the artist took the Norwegian as
his model. It is Munch's spirit that reverberates as early as 1983 in,
Edvards Geist, Edvards Kopf and Die Frau aus dem Osten (cat. 49-51), where
the head of the renowned Scream (1893, Oslo, Nasjonalgalleriet) materialises
as an insert alongside or embedded in the figure caught up in the sinuous
and almost decorative swirls of the background. Within the "religious"
painting that Baselitz embarked upon around 1983-84, where we can identify a
messenger, Lazarus, Stephatos in Italy, a Pietā, a mocking of Christ and the
crowning with thorns, the legend of king Abgar occupies a key position. The
suffering king sends a messenger to Jesus, who sends him back a piece of
cloth with an imprint of his face, upon beholding it the king is cured. The
Abgarbilder (cat. 53-55) take the form of frontal masks, sometimes joined to
arms, with large contrasting expanses of green and red. Baselitz displays a
masterly handling of this taut and unstable complementary chromatic
relationship drawn from the hose, tunics and shields of the slumbering
guards at the sepulchre in the Resurrezione (Resurrection, 1463-1465) by
Piero della Francesca at Borgo Sansepolcro. Closer to us, the popular works
that revive the warm and simple liveliness of Bohemian glass paintings (cat.
92-97), displaying neither the same fury for painting nor the same haughty
authority as appear elsewhere in the course of an astounding career,
nevertheless allow us to glimpse the fact that painter's brush was guided by
genuine pleasure with unquestionable joy in contemplation (of the images).
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Georg Baselitz
Adhikara Art Gallery
updated 15.02.18