On April 30, the studio of German artist and sculptor Georg Baselitz announced his death. He was 88 years old. Baselitz was the most important German modern expressionist artist, and one of the founders of the New Wilde style. In the 1980s, he became one of the highest-paid German painters, along with Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer. One of his most famous artistic techniques is upside-down paintings. In addition, he made wood sculptures using an ax and saw. Critic Anton Khitrov talks about these and other artistic discoveries of Baselitz.
The author of this text is Anton Khitrov – the presenter of the program Telegram channel conspiracy About culture in the age of bad news. Subscribe to follow the world of art!
A few years ago, there was an April Fool’s prank in the Berlin art magazine Monopol joke: Art historians allegedly discovered that George Baselets’ paintings had been hanging upside down in the museum for years. The authors of the note made fun of various funny news about abstract painting: True, it is not always clear where is the upper part, and where is the lower part, and even experts sometimes make mistakes.
The joke was that Baselitz was not an abstractionist at all, but deliberately displayed his paintings upside down. More precisely, I didn’t show it, but I wrote it that way from the beginning. Almost any Monopol reader will know this, because we’re talking about one of the most famous contemporary German artists – and the technique that made him famous.
To interpret Baselitz’s projected paintings, it is useful to ask: Where in the history of Western art do we encounter images turned upside down? The only thing that comes to my mind is the ceiling painting – Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, in the domes of Russian churches. Their creators worked with a horizontal surface – just like Baselitz, who did not sit at the easel, but painted the canvas on the floor: the top and bottom of the picture in such conditions is a relative concept. So, if you look at Michelangelo’s “The Creation of the World” with your back to the altar, the figures will appear upside down.
Another thing is that turning your back to the altar is not at all customary. Michelangelo, like the ancient Russian icon painters, created his frescoes for a space in which the viewer’s body was subject to special regulations. Ultimately, any Christian temple symbolically represents the universe (“ordered” from the Greek): everything, including man, has its designated place there. The Creation of the World can only be seen upside down by a tourist who uses the Sistine Chapel, strictly speaking, for other purposes.
Baselitz’s lyric hero, if we develop this metaphor, has lost harmony with the universe; He sees things upside down because he walks on his head. Or rather, it even floats in weightlessness. Baselitz is a child of war, of the generation of Germans in the 1960s who demanded justice for the past. His upside-down paintings reflect the point of view of a man who witnessed the collapse of all norms. No wonder their recurring theme is the German logo eagle With widely spread wings, which if it flies somewhere, then into the abyss.
There is another explanation, not the most pompous one: by alternating the top and bottom, Baselitz succeeded in reconciling two branches of painting that were at war in the first half of the twentieth century – abstraction and abstraction.
The artist was influenced by both of these traditions. A native of Saxony, which became part of the German Democratic Republic after the war, he studied painting in East Berlin and thus mastered socialist realism until he was expelled from school for “political immaturity.” Then, in the late 1950s, there was no wall yet, and Baselitz was able to move to the West, where abstraction prevailed, and the American Jackson Pollock was considered the premier contemporary artist. He never abandoned figurative painting, but over time (at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s) he found a way to make color and form dominate the subject in the eyes of the viewer: in effect, he painted objects and shapes upside down.
In general, the historical mission of the Neo-Expressionists was precisely the rehabilitation of pictorial art. By the middle of the twentieth century, it was not only unfashionable, but vulnerable, because its main ambassadors turned out to be totalitarian regimes. However, Baselitz and his like-minded people – Eugen Schönbeck, Markus Lüpertz – relied not on totalitarian aesthetics, but on modernist aesthetics, proclaimed by the Nazis, primarily on German expressionism.
Specifically, for Baselitz, the most important reference point in his entire life was the “Bridge” group, founded in Dresden in 1903 and disbanded on the eve of the First World War. The participants – Fritz Bleil, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Haeckel, and Carl Schmidt-Rottluff – depicted reality not as the human eye sees it, but rather intensely, sharply, and dramatically. Echoes of the bridge are evident, for example, in the early Baselitz cycle “Heroes”where the upper and lower parts are still in their places, but the feeling of the broken world is already clear. The characters there are mostly soldiers: mutilated, paralyzed, with incorrect proportions, wearing clothes of an incomprehensible color. And with the flags falling from their hands.
Carpentry, another important direction in Baselitz’s artistic practice, is also influenced by the bridge. Expressionist sculpture broke away from high antique examples and gravitated towards the “barbaric” Gothic style, hence the choice of material: not stone or bronze, but wood.
When Baselitz, already a famous artist, wanted to become a sculptor in the late 1970s, he… decided Here take an example from the ancient teachers. However, his wood sculptures turned out to be more massive and rough than those of Kirchner or Schmidt-Rottluff. Their followers carried not a knife, but an ax and a saw, so his sculptures look like they could easily plant a splinter. Huge, static, devoid of individual features – just like pagan idols. By the way, he was inspired by African art – just like the Expressionists: he even collected his rather large works group.
The connection with paganism is not accidental. When looking at Baselitz’s sculptures, you can literally see him swinging an axe. Looking at the paintings, you imagine how he smears paint on the canvas with his fingers, without the help of a brush (he actually did that a lot). His works are clearly handmade. They literally make you think about creative work. Since the main subject of Baselitz was always a human figure, the goal of this work turned out to be to revive inanimate objects, to liken dead matter to itself, in a word, to see its reflection in nature. Therefore, no matter how tragic his art is, it cannot be reduced to the horror of war and totalitarianism alone.