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Lot Essay
The present work belongs to a series of paintings executed in homage to the German Expressionist artists from the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The Expressionists had created vanguard paintings characterized by primitivizing tendencies and experimental color combinations. In the present painting, their lineage is clear in the figures' spectral bodies and mask-like faces, as well as in the composition's vigorous stylization and gestural brushwork.
In the present work, color plays a structural role and large-scale figures are outlined with emphatic contours. Both bodies, articulated through agitated brushwork, are placed against a light blue background. Like many of Baselitz's works of this period, the present painting incorporates, and redirects, both art-historical and Christian references. The figure at the right, potentially meant to represent Christ, is differentiated through brighter hues and a yellow aura, as if his traditional halo has expanded to engulf his entire body and the color is meant to convey a most intense spiritual presence. As Andreas Franzke has asserted, "These devices are clearly employed to counter the naive, story-telling associations of the motifs, with their burden of traditional iconography," (A. Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich, 1989, p. 195).
(fig. 1) Baselitz in his Derneburg studio, 1981. Courtesy Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne.
In the present work, color plays a structural role and large-scale figures are outlined with emphatic contours. Both bodies, articulated through agitated brushwork, are placed against a light blue background. Like many of Baselitz's works of this period, the present painting incorporates, and redirects, both art-historical and Christian references. The figure at the right, potentially meant to represent Christ, is differentiated through brighter hues and a yellow aura, as if his traditional halo has expanded to engulf his entire body and the color is meant to convey a most intense spiritual presence. As Andreas Franzke has asserted, "These devices are clearly employed to counter the naive, story-telling associations of the motifs, with their burden of traditional iconography," (A. Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich, 1989, p. 195).
(fig. 1) Baselitz in his Derneburg studio, 1981. Courtesy Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne.