Baselitz had already seen Guston’s abstracts and the American painter’s fleshy language was evident even before his return to figuration in 1969. Nods to Soutine’s meat and Gericault’s studies of severed limbs for the Raft of the Medusa are clear, but it’s impossible not to compare them to Guston’s feet, painted several years later. The whole nation’s spittle, floating on their soup.”īaselitz’s brutal early paintings of feet are superb. It evokes the first lines of the Pandemonium manifesto: “Poets lay in the gutter, their bodies in the morass. Antonin, a seething mass of paint as flesh, with vast erect penises, is among the coarse, abject works that make for a dramatic opening to the show. Informed by the transgressive absurdism of Antonin Artaud and Samuel Beckett, they were Baselitz’s response to the cultural ruins of post-war Germany. In his early 20s, he wrote two Pandemonium Manifestos with Eugen Schönebeck, and they appear in the exhibition, dotted with Baselitz’s intense ink drawings. The curators wisely summarise the wilderness years, where Baselitz loses his thread This was the grounding for what followed. Trips to Paris and Amsterdam were also hugely formative: he encountered Gericault and Soutine, Dubuffet and Michaux. He encountered the Abstract Expressionists-he particularly liked Pollock, De Kooning and Guston-but gained little satisfaction from the European abstraction that had become dominant. He was expelled for doing so and went to West Berlin in 1958, three years before the wall was built, and adopted the name of his village, Baselitz. Baselitz says that little Modern art from Western Europe crept through to the German Democratic Republic, but he did learn about Picasso enough to incorporate his language into his early experiments. At art school in East Berlin from 1956, he immediately rejected the doctrine of the teachers. Famously, he once said he grew up amid “a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society”. His father, a teacher, was a committed Nazi and the young Hans-Georg witnessed the ruins of Dresden up close, a week after the Allied bombing of the city.
He was born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 and grew up in Deutschbaselitz, a village in Saxony, eastern Germany. A chance to look at Baselitz afresh, at a time when painting is abundant and thrillingly diverse, is welcome.īaselitz’s early biography is crucial to the heroic legend. One of the difficulties in seeing his work lies in the heroic mythologies that form an armour around it. “In fact,” he declares, “I am a monster.” It’s classic Baselitz. In an interview in the catalogue for this huge retrospective, Georg Baselitz ponders what kind of artist he is-he’s anything but serious, he’s an inveterate experimenter, he says.