- documenta
“The problem is not the object in the picture, but the picture as an object.”
(Georg Baselitz)
As became known at the end of last week, Georg Baselitz passed away on April 30th at the age of 88. The painter and sculptor, who had been known since the late 1960s for his upside-down motifs, was one of the most internationally successful German artists of his time.
From the very beginning of his career, Baselitz drew attention as a rebellious figure. Born in 1938 as Hans-Georg Kern in the Saxon town of Deutschbaselitz, he began studying in 1956 at the Berlin-Weißensee College of Art under Walter Womacka (1925–2010). However, he soon ran into ideological trouble: after two semesters, he was expelled for “socio-political immaturity” and transferred to the West Berlin counterpart, the College of Fine Arts — today known as the UdK. There he studied under Hann Trier (1915–1999), himself a three-time documenta participant, whose informal painting style would nonetheless leave little mark on Baselitz’s own work.
Together with Eugen Schönebeck, and now going by the self-chosen name “Baselitz,” he proclaimed in two Pandemonium Manifestos in the early 1960s a break with traditional forms of painting — before a well-calculated art scandal catapulted him into the public spotlight: his first solo exhibition ended in 1963 with police confiscating two works deemed offensive. The court case over alleged pornography, involving the paintings The Big Night Down the Drain and Naked Man, made waves across West Germany and was closely followed — with particular attention to the “freedom of art” — even in the Hessische Allgemeine newspaper in distant Kassel.
In Kassel, Baselitz was represented at three documenta exhibitions from 1972 onwards, with paintings and graphic works; Harald Szeemann, Manfred Schneckenburger, and Rudi Fuchs each in turn chose to present his pictures and drawings. Documenta 6 (1977) generated particular media attention when he — alongside Markus Lüpertz and A.R. Penck — withdrew his works in protest against the inclusion of artists from the GDR.
In 1980, Baselitz reinvented himself as a sculptor, making his first appearance at the German Pavilion with a large-scale wooden sculpture (Model for a Sculpture, 1980). Figures carved from tree trunks with axes and chainsaws, then painted, became a permanent feature of his work from that point on.
His engagement with the traumas of German history and national symbols — rooted in his own biography and playing a central role especially in his work of the 1960s and 1970s — was repeatedly met with skepticism by critics. Influential art critic Benjamin Buchloh, for instance, saw the return to figuration and the references to the tradition of German painting as signs of regression — a verdict he elaborated at length in 1981 in the American magazine October.
Baselitz himself, who throughout his life distanced himself from comparisons with the Expressionism of the Brücke artists, held a decidedly personal view on German painting: “The tradition of German painting is the tradition of ugly pictures.”
Federal Chancellor Gerhard Schröder seemed little bothered by that. During his years in the Chancellery, the expressive Finger Painting / Eagle Partition (1972) — an eagle gliding upside down against a sky-blue background — became a permanent fixture of the country’s political iconography. The former provocateur had become, celebrated as a “painter-prince,” a national flagship artist.
Among the numerous prizes and honors Baselitz received are the Goslar Imperial Ring (1981) and the Praemium Imperiale of the Japan Art Association (2004) — one of the most prestigious awards in the world of fine arts.
