‘Gesellschaftspolitische Unreife‘, was the opinion of the East Berlin art academy about the young student Hans-Georg Kern (1938, Deutschbaselitz), in or around 1957. ‘Social political immaturity’. A damning judgment, because Kern was therefore expelled from school. The reason: he had tried to create a work of art in the style of Picasso, who was known as decadently Western in the GDR. “We no longer want to see abstract art in our academies,” the party leader had said five years earlier.
The Berlin Wall was not yet up, so Kern continued his studies in West Berlin, where he settled. In 1961, the year the wall was built, he adopted the pseudonym ‘Baselitz’ after his birthplace. With this one nom de guerre he honored his roots, but he also wanted to protect his family against the controversy he would surely cause.
And that indeed happened. Together with artist Eugen Schönebeck he wrote the manifesto ‘Pandemonium‘against it’Glatte und Schöne‘ in art, which he then put into action in his first solo exhibition in 1963. One of his paintings showed a nude and distorted male with a huge penis, work that was confiscated by the authorities.
Yet Baselitz did not simply shock at the time. He thought it was really necessary in Germany, because there was too much that was not discussed. He himself also felt the past weighing heavily on him. His father had been a member of the Nazi party and as a child he had seen Dresden burning in the distance. Merely looking ahead solves nothing, he thought, and that is why his work was about the past, the war, and being German. To do this, he used repulsiveness and German clichés in an angry art with deformed soldiers among the smoldering rubble of a country devastated by war.
A visitor walks past the large paintings (from left) ‘Willem Departs’, ‘Willem Appears’ and ‘White, Not Black’ by the German artist Georg Baselitz in the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich in 2019.
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Paint, composition, expression
But he became best known for the scenes he painted upside down, which he started doing from 1969 onwards. The idea was that a figurative representation distracts from the painterly qualities, you always look at what it represents. Turn it over and you look at the paint, composition, expression. For example, he painted nudes, factories, eagles. In the 1980s, as a neo-expressionist, he added references to old expressionists such as Edvard Munch and Emil Nolde. He also took up sculpting, not with a chisel but a chainsaw.
Such a sculpture caused another scandal at the 1980 Venice Biennale: some thought the statue was giving a Hitler salute. The fact that it was painted in black, red and white didn’t help much. Although Baselitz has often admitted that he enjoyed controversy, he said in this case he did not seek it. But it did help: now he stood out internationally in a new figurative style, together with fellow countrymen Markus Lüpertz, AR Penck and Anselm Kiefer. In the Netherlands he was supported by Rudi Fuchs, then director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. And an extra nice moment of recognition was when Chancellor Gerhard Schröder hung one of his upside-down eagles in his office. From rioter to established order.
The work ‘Oberon’ by Georg Baselitz in the Städel Kunstmuseum in Frankfurt am Main.
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Baselitz became so popular that it was almost a cliché when museums bought his upside-down paintings (‘For God’s sake no Baselitz’ was the headline NRC in 1998 during an interview with the De Beyerd museum in Breda, which wanted to do things differently). In the meantime, monumentality and heaviness remained part of his work, meter-high paintings with thick paint that he spread with palette knives. Some wondered why he still painted upside down, was that really still artistically necessary or mainly a trademark?
But Baselitz’s earlier contribution to art history was certain. His paintings sold for many millions and in Munich he had a beautiful white studio designed by the architectural firm Herzog & De Meuron. “The situation for us artists today is heavenly,” he said in the 1910s. “I could never have anticipated this when I started.” Hans-Georg Kern, Georg Baselitz, died on Thursday at the age of 88.
Georg Baselitz’s ‘Portrait Series’ at the Albertinum in Dresden in 2015.
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