拍品专文
With Nackte Bäume, 1989, Baselitz returns to a theme which had played a significant role in his art since the early 1960s. Like his colleagues, Markus Lüpertz and Anselm Kiefer, Baselitz seems at times to be obssessed with images which refer back to German history and Germanic mythology. His "Hero" paintings of the mid 1960s, as well as to the horrors and destruction of the Second World War. In the latter interpretation, these symbols clearly represent post-war Germany. Here, the naked or burned tree can be read as a symbol of defeat and devastation, while the proud, tall and flourishing tree is generally interpreted as a symbol of the reconstruction of the country in the era of the "Wirtschaftswunder". Nackte Bäume depicts "naked trees", a symbol closely related to the "Heroes" whose exposed genitalia underscore the vunerability of nakedness.
The powerful colours and energetic technique of Nackte Bäume highlight Baselitz's debt to the German Expressionists, especially Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. His depiction of a forest, however, reaches even further back in art history to the German Romantic movement and in particular to the cult of nature as advocated by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich. Yet whereas the Romantics sought God in the sublime landscape, Baselitz's viewpoint has been affected by a modern scepticism. As Michael Brenson writes, "...in Baselitz's late 20th century world, nature has been too roughed up, too exploited, too toxified, to allow for a religion of landscape. Baselitz wants to make his paintings an expression of a life force essential to natural and human life but with little relation to the way either of them looks and feels. He sees art as an arena beyond good and evil, where reality has not yet been sorted out, where nature is not just harmony and peace, or flowers and wings, but something that can seem to the human mind savage and cruel. Only by struggling for an absolute immediacy that renders conventional distinctions sentimental and useless can Baselitz conceive of an art that has the right and the potential to endure." (Michael Brenson in: Georg Baselitz, Pace Gallery, New York 1992, p. 13).
In 1969, Baselitz made a radical change in his art by inverting the subject matter. In doing so, he forces the viewer to look beyond the content to concentrate on painterly values. Thus, Baselitz's paintings are influenced not only by the rich tradition of German Expressionism, but also by his early admiration for the freedom of of the Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, whose paintings he first saw in Berlin in 1958. His bold, vigourous style of brushstroke was clearly inspired by such precedents. The success of this approach is especially evident in Nackte Bäume, where the viewer is persuaded to first admire the lusciousness of the impasto and the spontaneous handling of the brushstokes before reading any meaning into the painting. Like Jackson Pollock with his "drip paintings", Baselitz chose for this painting an "all over composition" without a central point of focus. It is detail of reality which, in the eyes of the viewer, seems to extend beyond the confines of the canvas. The yellow background is flat, distrupting any reference to spatial depth. Here as well, Baselitz forces the viewer to concentrate on his use of colour and brushstroke, making the process of painting the actual subject of his work.
The powerful colours and energetic technique of Nackte Bäume highlight Baselitz's debt to the German Expressionists, especially Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. His depiction of a forest, however, reaches even further back in art history to the German Romantic movement and in particular to the cult of nature as advocated by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich. Yet whereas the Romantics sought God in the sublime landscape, Baselitz's viewpoint has been affected by a modern scepticism. As Michael Brenson writes, "...in Baselitz's late 20th century world, nature has been too roughed up, too exploited, too toxified, to allow for a religion of landscape. Baselitz wants to make his paintings an expression of a life force essential to natural and human life but with little relation to the way either of them looks and feels. He sees art as an arena beyond good and evil, where reality has not yet been sorted out, where nature is not just harmony and peace, or flowers and wings, but something that can seem to the human mind savage and cruel. Only by struggling for an absolute immediacy that renders conventional distinctions sentimental and useless can Baselitz conceive of an art that has the right and the potential to endure." (Michael Brenson in: Georg Baselitz, Pace Gallery, New York 1992, p. 13).
In 1969, Baselitz made a radical change in his art by inverting the subject matter. In doing so, he forces the viewer to look beyond the content to concentrate on painterly values. Thus, Baselitz's paintings are influenced not only by the rich tradition of German Expressionism, but also by his early admiration for the freedom of of the Abstract Expressionist painters such as Jackson Pollock, whose paintings he first saw in Berlin in 1958. His bold, vigourous style of brushstroke was clearly inspired by such precedents. The success of this approach is especially evident in Nackte Bäume, where the viewer is persuaded to first admire the lusciousness of the impasto and the spontaneous handling of the brushstokes before reading any meaning into the painting. Like Jackson Pollock with his "drip paintings", Baselitz chose for this painting an "all over composition" without a central point of focus. It is detail of reality which, in the eyes of the viewer, seems to extend beyond the confines of the canvas. The yellow background is flat, distrupting any reference to spatial depth. Here as well, Baselitz forces the viewer to concentrate on his use of colour and brushstroke, making the process of painting the actual subject of his work.