As his art throughout the decades has no traceable progression, as one would expect when reviewing a retrospective, it seems he is three artists operating under the same pseudonym - ‘Baselitz’. The first is a patriot with a strong grasp of his country’s ideals and history. The second is a violent man, disfiguring and slashing his medium. The third must be the most prominent, a little boy playing with his willy in defiance of authoritative figures.
The patriot
Whether for or against its actions Baselitz has a visceral understanding of the wants, needs and guilt of his country and its people.
Baselitz is a clear stepping stone from early expressionists like Schmidt-Rottluff to contemporary German art. Although there is a great deal of freedom in the early expressionists they are still trapped by tradition. Along with artists such as Kiefer, Baselitz is one of the first to truly liberate the process. Perhaps because reason and politics are less of a concern, so raw emotion and instinct overrides. I believe it is a misconception that an artist has to delve into politics to make a difference. Baselitz takes this concept one step further:
‘To talk about progress is humbug. All deep meanings we attribute to art are irrelevant. The only important thing is whether you have fun doing it.’ – Baselitz 2006
I do agree that if an artist enjoys their work it improves dramatically but I do not necessarily agree that it has no deeper meaning and find it ironic coming from someone who has had such an influence on the world. The result of his political dismissal is raw expression. Baselitz relates this specifically to German ideals but I would go so far as to say that it penetrates a universal human experience. At the same time his early pictures capture the mood of the German people post World-War II, not as a sociological study but simple painting what he saw around him at the time.
In this way he is strongly connected to his Germanic roots and seems rightly proud of this fact. But being an artist defined by race has its limitations as well as advantages. As an actor it is not something I am necessarily interested in and am proud of my international idiosyncrasies. For this reason at times I note a sense of regret in Baselitz that he has linked himself so strongly to his heritage.
‘People always refer to me as German and it is such a burden’ – Baselitz 2006
In the mid-sixties come the Germanic figures of the shepherds, partisans and … although I enjoy the demi-god like status that is given to these Germanic heroes, almost as if their very existence is an act of hubris, aesthetically they are putrid. Baselitz does not have a keen eye for beauty and colour until the late 60s with pictures like Two Meissen Woodsmen. But give them a few seconds more than the average 7 and one begins to note the atmosphere of a passing tragedy. It is not in the action, but in the air. The aftermath is shattered in The Tree, exposed and vulnerable The Shepherd sits, his landscape left murky and his leg dismembered. A backwards soldier lumberjacking through an arid Slavic forest. Baselitz paints a powerful picture of post-war Germany, indeed the environment surrounding his childhood. A civilisation without sympathy from the rest of the world, none-the-less destroyed and left disillusioned. These figures are not heroes but conquered peasants.
The Schwasticker is a symbol which is most associated with Germany’s darkest period. Yet Baselitz bands it about the place fearlessly, as if it were the symbol for peace or something, as in pictures such as The Great Friends (a picture he believes in so much he takes criticism into his own hands and writes a manifesto entitled ‘Why the Painting The Great Friends Is a Good Picture’). In the remix of this picture the Schwasticker is boldly inscribed in the figures’ palms and knees, whereas in the original it is more subtly integrated into the background. But the reference is not to Nazi idealism but post-Nazi remains. I believe this is the best description of Baselitz the patriot, an observer of post-Nazi remains.
The Butcher
In 1963 Baselitz created a series of paintings, very similar to the contemporary Australian artist Peter Booth, which are a violent exploration of the human body as a piece of meat. Acting as an artistic surgeon, body parts are dissected and at times reattached to other limbs resulting in mutant-like figures and post-atomic remains.
Baselitz has an exhilarating sense of violence to much of his work. It is inherent in subject and style, even down to the harshness of lines. In works such as Adieu the brush is so forcefully applied it cuts into the canvas. The pictures often feel frantic, invoking images of the painter attacking his materials. Women often seem to be the victim: in 45 (45 boards of slashed and painted wood) the boards at first appear as a pictorial voodoo doll for a woman, but I then realise the board and its background were first slashed then the woman’s portrait painted over the top. Look deeper into these paintings at what appears to be an anarchistic view and you are likely to find the opposite. This aspect to the pictures is dynamic and it is exciting to indulge in this vicious fantasy. It is curious how violence in fiction, when done well can be inspiring and receive wide acclaim, but violence in reality is regarded as one of the world’s biggest problems. You can see someone being stabbed to death along with an unending number of street fights, shootings and general urban disorder at (warning! extreme content): www.comegetyousome.com
I watched the footage on this site for hours trying to understand the difference. After I stopped, I felt a deeply rooted guilt, shame for humanity and in myself, but during the act of watching I felt a strange exhilaration. It appeals to our instinct for war, as we came to be the most powerful and dominant animals on earth by our success and brutality as predators. At one time there were several species of ape-men existing alongside us and yes we made them extinct as have we many other mammals, but as the need to hunt and fight is usually only a cerebral activity in the daily life of an urban human being (i.e. advancing professionally) we rarely engage in physical violence. It is what drives the masses to sport, the promise of guilt-free bloodshed. But the feeling I get from watching a Mel Gibson film or indeed looking at an early Baselitz picture is something far different, but why should it be? Sexual fantasy inspires much of the same feeling as actual sex (only less satisfying).
So I sit in front of the blood-soaked torso of a woman entitled Torso of a woman (a sculpture by Baselitz). At first the shock isolates me, then I am fascinated, fantasising about the brutal incident that created it. A torso was not freed from this piece of wood like Michelangelo’s David but was hacked into the pitiful remains of a human body. Shocking isn’t it…
Baselitz and his middle finger
There is no doubt as to the immediate impact of Baselitz’s pictures, but are they a gimmick?
I can’t help but think there is a little boy inside Baselitz playing with his willy and sticking his finger up at his grandmother. Perhaps it is something inherent in all artists, that to the generation of parents born early to mid last century, there is as an air of shame in thinking that their child could stoop so low as to pick up a brush or for that matter take to the boards, and in defiance of this we play with our willies and stick up our fingers. This concept seems to be in the foreground of nearly all of Baselitz’s pictures, the subject and context changes, politics, the art world, war, patriotism and sex, but not the concept. Perhaps this is the only thing he sticks to throughout his career. Baselitz himself confesses The Long Night Down the Drain, a painting of a man with his cock hanging out of his zip, is the best picture he’s ever done.
None-the-less Baselitz and his middle finger should not be overlooked as gimmickry because once you see past its geometric differences to other more logical artists you see that Baselitz is not necessarily experimenting with the medium of painting but within his own art. He is searching for a better understanding, a better way to paint, a feeling of satisfaction. His work does not assert the thoughts of a man at peace. With each painting he may feel he is coming closer to an ultimate goal. The sad truth is that once the picture is finished, like many artists he realises he is back at the beginning once more. So with the next he butchers the image, alters his style, re-invents what is definitively Baselitz, but still no luck, no progression, he goes back to his previous style because he felt closer there and it starts again. It is true that this results in much external contrivance within the image and can be very annoying to look at. But I think what we see is not necessarily the arrogance of a man with clever marketing but a frantic and desperate search for an ultimate truth.
I genuinely believe that post-expressionists more than others have incredible difficulty understanding when they have created an objectively decent painting. This must come from a result of their process which is so organic and instinctual they do not deny anything however fundamentally flawed. Keiffer’s exhibition at White Cube was considerably less impressive than his earlier work, but still I forgive him as a champion of his art because (although I would never recommend the exhibition as a whole with the exception of the monumental painting with a concrete staircase protruding from the canvas) I understand the exhibition’s weakness was a result of his unstoppable process. The same is with Baselitz, arguably one of the most instinctual painters working today.
It must be a given that some of the structure is contrived to be provocative. This was initially admirable early on in his career in order to fight against more conservative views in Germany during the late fifties and early sixties, but today with so much experimentation simply being provocative for its own sake is irrelevant, besides it’s not particularly controversial by today’s standards. Now either Baselitz is entirely unaware of the standards of shock value he competes with in contemporary entertainment or he paints his subjective truth. So much criticism of Baselitz’s work says that he is merely painting up-side-down and back-to-front just to provoke and simply appear to be different, i.e. a gimmick. Indeed Peter Fuller was among these critics, but I question this point of view. An interesting perspective was suggested to me by Stephanie Burns: she is of the thought that the retina naturally sees a negative and it is the mind that reverses the image, so Baselitz creates pure imagery in accordance with the way our eyes naturally see. Evidence of the man to me suggests he paints purely what he feels and is genuinely uninfluenced by the market place. None-the-less the result angers people.
Surely it is strange to have a complete acceptance of abstraction, but with the addition of a recognisable figure it provokes suspicion. This obviously confuses the human mind and inspires feelings of annoyance and fear. When something is out of place in a familiar context it is scary, like when you return home to find your parents have turned your old room into a study, the same reason George Bush had a second run as president: people generally dislike change. This is what a Baselitz picture does to the human brain - it challenges the familiar. Proverbial figures such as Folk art are reassembled and attacked, My Parents are flipped and distorted. This makes people angry, certainly myself at first, but if the figures were not recognisable, and purely an attempt at abstract composition it would not illicit such feelings, nor would a more literal representation of the human form. This middle ground between abstract and figurative that expressionists are so apt at exploring, unlocks a way of seeing people that is like visually feeling them. It hits the nerve in between the retina and the medulla oblongata, between a literal and an emotional understanding of other people and therein lies a truth. This for me is something worth looking at
UK Editor. Laurence is Peter's son and an actor working in London
