PRESENTATION: Baselitz Naked Masters

Covering nearly every artistic medium, Georg Baselitz has established himself as a visual artist of international stature. His work confronts the visceral reality of history and tragedy of being German in a post World War II era. Baselitz was best known for his inverted, or upside-down paintings that shift emphasis from subject to the properties of painting itself, creating not just a painted canvas, but a nearly sculptural object. The anamorphic quality of his heroic and rebellious figures has had a powerful and international influence on Neo-Expressionist artists.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna Archive

On the occasion of his 85th birthday, Georg Baselitz was invited for an exhibition project in which the artist enters a visual conversation with Cranach, Altdorfer, Baldung Grien, Parmigianino, Correggio, Titian, and Rubens as well as the Mannerists at the court of Emperor Rudolph II. He selected the works himself: 73 of his paintings and two of his sculptures from the years 1972 to 2022 are shown together with forty works from the Picture Gallery. The late œuvre by Georg Baselitz is on show in a hitherto unknown extent. Works were dominantly selected for formal and visual criteria; moreover, the entire exhibition focuses exclusively on the nude, the naked figure. Rather than the mythological and biblical narratives recounted in the Old Masters’ paintings, Baselitz is interested in that elementary condition of humankind. This central topic of European art forms the core of the exhibition.  Drawing, print-making, painting, and sculpture: like the Old Masters, Baselitz has limited his oeuvre to these disciplines, working from his earliest pieces always with a distinctive awareness of the history of art. He has been particularly impressed by Mannerism and its programmatic infractions of the classical ideals of the Renaissance ‒ a protest arising out of a fundamental experience of crisis that no longer permits the maintenance of outdated notions of order. The course of the exhibition covers five large sections. These show the artist’s pictures in strict chronological order, so that each room with its abutting chambers leaves its very own, cohesive visual impression. The pictures are juxtaposed with those of the Old Masters from the Picture Gallery that are hung next to, above and below them. museum architecture, which is thereby also presented in a unique manner.  In the first room, the first human couple, Adam and Eve, presented in pictures by Cranach, Memling, and others, encounter Baselitz’s earliest nudes. Baselitz and his wife Elke are the only models used. These are confident, powerful depictions of the body, clearly over life-size and without narrative elements, presented in the sheer existential condition of being. They are not painted by brush, but using fingers. Rather than depicting reality, Baselitz creates his own, a new, reality. The art of painting still retains its ability to formulate new pictures (of humans) and contribute demonstrative reflections on elementary questions. This concerns not least the potential for self-reflection inherent in the medium of painting itself. The figures were developed in drawing, their multi-dimensional nature is an indication of the artist’s growing interest in questions of sculpture. The exhibition also ‘tells’ this story. The group of works from the early 1970s is followed in the second room by a dense ensemble from the period around 1980. These are pictures in which Baselitz worked on the cusp of abstraction in a very reduced, elementary and gestural manner of painting and explored new possibilities of structuring the pictorial field. The Old Masters selected for this room, including Titian and Paolo Fiammingo, interest Baselitz for questions of composition and coloration, but not their visual narratives adopted from the bible or classical mythology. Baselitz uses the juxtapositions primarily in order to trace aspects of pictorial art, seeking to draw the visitors’ attention to these.

The third section of the exhibition shows works from the 1990s in an entirely new, delicate and light manner of painting that displays qualities of ink drawings and watercolours despite the pictures’ large formats. Baselitz combines the couples in these pictures with the eroticizing body images by the Mannerists at the court of Emperor Rudolph from around 1600, in particular Bartholomäus Spranger. A network of allusions unfolds in Baselitz’s pictures from this phase, with references to Albrecht Dürer, François Boucher, Frida Kahlo, and Marcel Duchamp. This is where a stroll through the exhibition evolves into a special exploration of space and time. In Ade Nymphen, Baselitz cites the reclining female nude by Dürer, liberates its instructive construction from its strict corset, waters it down and duplicates it, to then appoint the pair of women with sensuous color. Baselitz considers Marcel Duchamp an opponent. Duchamp was one of the founders of Concept Art with his Readymades, and thereby declared painting obsolete – utterly unacceptably so for Baselitz. Without further ado, Baselitz condemns Duchamp to living on his pictures, in the very medium that the latter he had declared dead: in “Melody” (1999), “Newly in Love – M. D.” (1999), In “the Woods of Blainville” (2000) and “Band of Clouds” (2000).  In the fourth and fifth room with their abutting chambers, Georg Baselitz’s works from between 2010 and 2022, is on show in a manner that has not been seen in Austria before. The figures levitate as shadows, like reduced ciphers in the huge formats, achieving an entirely unique simultaneity of monumentality and fragility. At first sight, the pictures appear monochrome, but a closer look reveals their extraordinarily subtle textures and nuances. In part, the colors sprayed onto or applied to the canvas using the counterproof technique. These works combine half a century of artistic and technical experience with an unbroken joy at trying out the new and unexpected. In “The Ice Skating Woman” (2019), the artist toys with the method of American Action Painting without entirely letting go of the object. Since the spring of 2020, a new element has entered the artist’s pictorial world: he collages nylon stockings into his paintings. Baselitz is fascinated on the one hand by Dada artist Kurt Schwitters and on the other hand here especially inspired by the photo montages made by painter, graphic designer, and collage artist Hannah Höch.  In these two final rooms of the exhibition, Baselitz involves colleagues like Titian, Correggio, and Parmigiano in a visual artistic conversation across time and space and invites the visitors to participate: a unique aesthetic and, in light of the topic of the naked body, existential experience.

Photo left: Georg Baselitz, Finger Painting – Female Nude, 1972, Oil on canvas, 250 × 180 cm, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. Donation: Georg Baselitz © Georg Baselitz 2023, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, photo: Finn Brøndum. Right: Georg Baselitz, Finger Painting – Nude, 1972, Oil on canvas, 250 × 180 cm, Private collection, © Georg Baselitz 2023, photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin

Info: Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Maria-Theresien-Platz, Vienna, Austria, Duration: 7/3-25/9/2023, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-21:00, www.khm.at/