Lot Essay
Das Malerbild [The Painter's Picture] is in many ways a grand and comprehensive self-portrait; an allegory for self-reflection. While Baselitz paints within the Expressionist tradition, his work reaches further, creating his own visual language in which the pictoral statement is asserted as the driving force and main content of his art. These schematics of such varied formulas have allowed him to set aesthetic patterns, and achieve a position as one of the outstanding figures of German art today. Norman Rosenthal elaborates,
Das Malerbild represents for the artist a kind of summary--a statement on a very large scale of many of the artist's formal and ideological concerns. Many of the images appeared in earlier paintings. At the top right is a chair on which rests a bottle; to its left is an eagle, a symbol of freedom featured in a major group of paintings done by the artist in 1981, but it is an eagle that looks as though it could scarcely fly. At the bottom of the painting is a pig (a symbol of intelligence) seemingly entangled in yellow mesh. At the left of the canvas are two further motifs, a house and a tree. Significantly, the latter is the first motif that Baselitz chose to paint upside down in 1969 in the painting The Forest on Its Head [Der Wald an den Kopf]. Contrasting with these traditional motifs, to the extreme left of the painting is a small yellow window on which is delineated an airplane, which the artist has described as a threatening, sinister element. It is certainly the only foreign element in a repertoire of motifs that stand for the traditional, even conservative, sources that inform the artist's inspiration.
Das Malerbild is, however, primarily a painting of heads and full-length female figures, each staring out from the painting. For Baselitz each figure is associated with an admired artist and represents the muse of the artist or what Baselitz described as the female element in the artist's make-up: his sensibility (Empfindsamkeit). Baselitz's pantheon includes, among others, the little-known Swedish painter Carl Frederick Hill and the Viennese painter Richard Gerstl, who committed suicide at the age of twenty-five and was a colleague of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka. Also represented in Das Malerbild are the composer-painter Arnold Schönberg, Ludwig Meidner, the Berlin Expressionist who painted "apocalyptic landscapes" on the eve of World War I, and some of the artist's friends and contemporaries, among them A.R. Penck and Jörg Immendorff. For the artist the very large figure at the center of the canvas is an amalgam of the spirits of Edvard Munch and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Munch, along with van Gogh, was very much the originator of the Expressionist style in modern painting (N. Rosenthal, "Expanding the Possibilities for Painting: Baselitz, Polke, Kiefer," Affinities and Intuitions, The Gerald S. Elliott Collection of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1990, pp. 147-148).
Das Malerbild represents for the artist a kind of summary--a statement on a very large scale of many of the artist's formal and ideological concerns. Many of the images appeared in earlier paintings. At the top right is a chair on which rests a bottle; to its left is an eagle, a symbol of freedom featured in a major group of paintings done by the artist in 1981, but it is an eagle that looks as though it could scarcely fly. At the bottom of the painting is a pig (a symbol of intelligence) seemingly entangled in yellow mesh. At the left of the canvas are two further motifs, a house and a tree. Significantly, the latter is the first motif that Baselitz chose to paint upside down in 1969 in the painting The Forest on Its Head [Der Wald an den Kopf]. Contrasting with these traditional motifs, to the extreme left of the painting is a small yellow window on which is delineated an airplane, which the artist has described as a threatening, sinister element. It is certainly the only foreign element in a repertoire of motifs that stand for the traditional, even conservative, sources that inform the artist's inspiration.
Das Malerbild is, however, primarily a painting of heads and full-length female figures, each staring out from the painting. For Baselitz each figure is associated with an admired artist and represents the muse of the artist or what Baselitz described as the female element in the artist's make-up: his sensibility (Empfindsamkeit). Baselitz's pantheon includes, among others, the little-known Swedish painter Carl Frederick Hill and the Viennese painter Richard Gerstl, who committed suicide at the age of twenty-five and was a colleague of Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Oskar Kokoschka. Also represented in Das Malerbild are the composer-painter Arnold Schönberg, Ludwig Meidner, the Berlin Expressionist who painted "apocalyptic landscapes" on the eve of World War I, and some of the artist's friends and contemporaries, among them A.R. Penck and Jörg Immendorff. For the artist the very large figure at the center of the canvas is an amalgam of the spirits of Edvard Munch and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff. Munch, along with van Gogh, was very much the originator of the Expressionist style in modern painting (N. Rosenthal, "Expanding the Possibilities for Painting: Baselitz, Polke, Kiefer," Affinities and Intuitions, The Gerald S. Elliott Collection of Contemporary Art, Chicago 1990, pp. 147-148).