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It can be said that Baselitz (born in Germany, near the city of Dresden, in 1938) artistically “dominated” Paris. The great retrospective dedicated to him by Pompidou Centerno less than 143 works, is completed with the installation of a nine-meter-high sculpture produced in 2015 in front of the Academy of Fine Arts. Furthermore, the Museum of Modern Art in Paris presents an exhibition with six works donated by the artist in 2020 along with two others that were already part of his collections, and the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery organized an exhibition of drawings with intense colors, produced in this very anus. In summary; all Baselitz.
Baselitz's works are unique, they make us turn our heads to see the inverted images clearly.
The Pompidou exhibition, truly exemplary in its approach and arrangement of works, unfolds chronologically in eleven sections: On the discovery of the avant-garde, Self-portraits of a lived person, Of fallen heroes, Fractured images, Inversion of the image, Between abstraction and figuration, Beyond abstraction, “Zeitgeist” [Espíritu del tiempo]The space of memories, From “Russian Paintings” to “Remix”, and What Remains.
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What we see in it are paintings, many of them large, drawings and engravings, as well as five sculptures, dated between 1980 and 2014. Work on the sculptures began in 1977., when Baselitz began building a collection of African art that is currently considered one of the most important in the world. In 1980 he presented his first sculptural work at the Venice Biennale: model for a sculpture (1980), which had a great impact and is present in this sample.
Baselitz was born with the name Hans-Georg Bruno Kern in divided Germany, in the so-called Democratic Republic, in a small town then called Großbaselitz, whose name he would use in the formation of his artistic pseudonym: “Georg Baselitz” from 1961. Around the 1950s he began to discover painting, studied Fine Arts in East Berlin in 1956 and there Picasso's work became his fundamental reference. In 1957 he decided to cross the border and settle in West Berlin, where he would continue his training and in 1961-1962 he would publicly present his first exhibitions and artistic manifestos.
These beginnings, with the rejection of the totalitarian regime in force in the German Democratic Republic, mark one of the central milestones of his career. Something he himself pointed out retrospectively in 1995, in an interview with American art critic Donald Kuspit: “I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed society. And he didn't want to restore order, he had seen enough of the so-called order. (…) I am brutal, naive and gothic.”
There is something, however, that about this unique and outstanding artist is totally negative: his stance in not accepting the creative role of women in painting. Something he publicly proclaimed in 2013: “Women don’t paint very well”, and which he continued to insist on later. It's really regrettable.
Returning to his career, after receiving and assimilating the approaches of the artistic avant-gardes, and focusing his attention on poetry and music, his first works from the early 60s are set in an expressionist context, intensifying the visual noise of the expression with the chromatic overloads and the disorder of the composition. There is located his image of the wingless poet and artist, fallen at the bottom of experience, of the world, of life.
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The impulse of disorder led him in 1966 to divide the images into the representation, to fractured images. This would be a first step towards the beginning of the inversion of images in 1969, something that Baselitz locates in his desire not to paint in an anecdotal or descriptive way, as well as in his rejection of the approaches of so-called abstract painting. And with that he focuses on problems and issues specifically pictorial for him.
These approaches are also manifested in the use of remix, a term used in music to apply parts of a theme to make a new version. Baselitz uses this idea in reference to previous artistic approaches, to which he gives new twists and nuances. And in all of this there is also the decisive role of memory. Born into what he considered destruction, his artistic impulse springs from disorder. From the experience of destruction we move to the fragmentary and inverted representation of life. And here is the axis that articulates his work, and for which he has been recognized in the artistic world: the inversion of figuration, a process that began in 1969 and which continues until now, although it has relevant nuances of change and transformation.
Georg Baselitz thus structures a completely different and unique way of being a painter, breaking with illusionistic figuration and non-figurative abstraction. His works are unique and should not be confused with those of any other painter., they make us turn our heads to be able to see the inverted images clearly. It involves inverting vision to see in depth, thinking about the shapes of beings, objects and spaces.
