Whether the sculpture has been turned on its head or not remains a topic of speculation. When a young and up-and-coming artist is kicked out of an art academy, that could mean either an early end to his career or the beginning of life on the world stage.
The latter happened to Georg Baselitz. In , he moved from Deutschbaselitz in the state of Saxony to East Berlin to study art. But his schooling only lasted for two terms. During his vacations, the year-old Baselitz, whose name back then was still Hans-Georg Kern, refused to work at an industrial site in Rostock — something that was expected from students in the former communist East Germany. He preferred to paint in the style of Pablo Picasso. With the Berlin Wall not yet built, he was able to move from East to West Berlin where he became acquainted with the abstract art movement, which was prevalent in the German art world at the time.
Instead of following that artistic style, Baselitz, always protesting against the status quo, turned to expressive realism. In , the year when the Berlin Wall was built, he took on his nom de plume, stirring controversy once again by producing paintings that didn't fit the conservative conventions of the time.
Read more: Dresden museum replaces Baselitz paintings with provocative 'Euro' project. Baselitz and two Berlin-based gallerists had to testify before Berlin's state court, and finally, the Federal Court of Justice for having shown pornographic material. Both paintings depicted a figure with a huge penis, which to some viewers suggested masturbation. The proceedings were finally suspended. To this day, it remains unclear whether or not the scandal was actively stirred by gallerist Michael Werner, who was said to have promoted sensationalist reporting of the issue which then led to confiscation of the works.
Whether the allegations were true or not, Werner subsequently emerged as an important player in Germany's art market, and Baselitz suddenly managed to sell his paintings. Baselitz had finally established his image of an unfaltering rebel, an image that has remained with him his entire life. And he certainly never ceases to contribute to this image by making controversial statements. Some examples: he has repeatedly said women aren't able to paint, which is why prices for their works on the art market remain low.
And he once referred to the Documenta contemporary art exhibition in Kassel as the "Paralympics. On the occasion of the artist's 80th birthday, roughly of his works that he himself considers as "battles" have been on show in a retrospective on the Fondation Beyeler in Basel since January From June onward, the works, among them the controversial painting "The Naked Man," will be shown in Washington. In , Baselitz withdrew his loaned works from German museums, protesting against a planned revision of a German law on the protection of cultural goods.
That law, later relaxed, stipulated that it was no longer permitted to export entire museum collections, which meant that artists, collectors, gallerists and auction houses were only allowed to sell artworks in Germany. For Baselitz, all this was no reason to give up. The German art ranking Kunstkompass still puts him in the fourth position in a ranking of the most important contemporary living artists. What has greatly contributed to Baselitz's fame is his ability of reinventing himself and his art over and over again, sometimes to the desperation of art traders, as customers tend to buy familiar art.
In the mid s, Baselitz created roughly 60 paintings within a very short period of time, which became known as "Heroes. As Baselitz told Jagger, he "fumbled around" with 30 of these paintings because he grew tired of these exhausting images.
To him, the paintings were like a completed biographical work. However, in the s, Georg Baselitz began experimenting with sculpture. This again resulted in a great deal of controversy: after one of his sculptures was interpreted as portraying a Nazi salute at the 39th Venice Biennale. A few years later, Georg Baselitz would take on a more retrospective view of his own work, resulting in a series of remix paintings that paid homage to painters that had been an inspiration to him such as Otto Dix and Andy Warhol.
Discover the fascinating story and career of the Photographer of the Stars, who captured emblemat Humberto Calzada welcomes us into his house and studio to view the first pieces of his next exhib Inaugurated in , AfriArt's collection reflects the social and cultural values of a country du Skip to content. A need for a new chapter had arisen and this was to find form in the so-called "Fracture" paintings.
These represent a new form of cubism with German content and colour symbolism, as an answer to the paintings of Jasper Johns, which engage with the classical cubism of Picasso and Braque in an American way.
Following the birth of his second child in , Baselitz moved his family from Berlin to the countryside in Swabia, and the imagery of this series consists of traditional German motifs, such as huntsmen, cows, dogs and bears, used to find a new way of presenting a sense of time and dislocation. If his flight from the town to the country was symbolic and inevitable, so perhaps was his invention of the upside-down painting. By deliberately painting an image upside down not, of course, merely standing it on its head , Baselitz had hit on a method of objectifying the work of art without entering the realm of pure abstraction or allowing the motif to predominate.
In , Baselitz moved to a castle at Derneburg, not far from Hanover, with a vast studio and work spaces. His inversions led to international recognition, but also to misunderstandings. Some saw his upside-down imagery as an easy gimmick rather than a hard-won aesthetic, derived from philosophical, perceptual propositions of great originality. The conceit led to many outstanding paintings.
In Fingermalerei - Adler Finger Painting - Eagle, , the eagle as a motif has a symbolic character, and in its inversion, set against a painterly blue sky, it is laden with ambiguity. Does it symbolise the fall of German pride or is the image merely inverted? The bird itself seems full of life, ready to pounce on its prey within the inverted world that the artist has created. It caused further controversy in the career of an artist who was still relatively little known outside Germany, Switzerland, Holland and Denmark.
The sculpture is based at one level on an African Lobi figure, but with its one outstretched arm, it was a monumental, seated figure, apparently unfinished at the front, giving what could be interpreted as a "Hitler" salute.
This provocative work was placed alone in the middle of the German pavilion. Since the biennale, Baselitz has made a number of mostly monumental sculptures, including the yellow-painted Die Dresdner Frauen Women of Dresden, , that refer to the cultural and human tragedy of During the s, Baselitz's paintings became deliberately more crude, perhaps informed by his sculpture.
Works such Nachtessen in Dresden Supper in Dresden, can almost be imagined as sculptures. Arguably one of the most original and challenging works of the artist's "middle period" is the panelled spectacle entitled '45 It alludes to the end of the second world war and what in Germany came to be known as Stunde Null Zero Hour , when, at midnight on May 8 , the Nazi government capitulated.
The work is like a huge, late medieval German altarpiece. Each wooden panel is crudely painted with motifs, and the carved scratchings give a tragic character to this work that is almost low-relief sculpture, magnificently combining the artist's four classic disciplines of painting, drawing, sculpture and print-making.
As Baselitz has demonstrated throughout his career, despite art's destructive, anarchic possibilities, it also possesses a therapeutic value, for both the artist and the audience.
Since the late s, his art has become more transparent, even elegiac, without ever losing its sense of history and grandeur. In his latest works, called the "Remixes" borrowed from club culture , he takes motifs from his very earliest works and reinvents them with deliberately rapid and free execution.
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