Lot Essay
The distinctive topsy-turvy orientation of Baselitz's pictures has been a constant in his work since 1969. Through this inversion the artist wishes to disconcert the viewer and force him to concentrate on the formal aspects of the painted surface instead of simply on the narrative content. The success of this approach is especially evident in Borcke, where the spectator is persuaded to first admire the lusciousness of the impasto and the spontaneous handling of the brushstrokes before reading any meaning into the painting.
The powerful earthy colours and energetic technique of Borcke highlight Baselitz's debt to the German Expressionists. His depiction of a head within a landscape, 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 more modern sceptism. 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, Georg Baselitz, Pace Gallery 1992, p. 13).
In English, Borcke translates as the bark of a tree, but in this picture it is a reference to the burning forest which engulfs the upturned head of an unidentified person. In true Romantic tradition, man is therefore pitted against the forces of nature whose savage aspect is made clear by the blood red flames that lick at his countenance. But Baselitz has changed the "true" order of things. Whereas the human presence in a Romantic painting would normally be dwarfed by the vastness of the landscape so as to demonstrate man's pathetic insignificance when compared to the boundlessness of God within nature, Baselitz's head dominates his hellish environment. In trying to tame nature, man has destroyed it.
The powerful earthy colours and energetic technique of Borcke highlight Baselitz's debt to the German Expressionists. His depiction of a head within a landscape, 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 more modern sceptism. 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, Georg Baselitz, Pace Gallery 1992, p. 13).
In English, Borcke translates as the bark of a tree, but in this picture it is a reference to the burning forest which engulfs the upturned head of an unidentified person. In true Romantic tradition, man is therefore pitted against the forces of nature whose savage aspect is made clear by the blood red flames that lick at his countenance. But Baselitz has changed the "true" order of things. Whereas the human presence in a Romantic painting would normally be dwarfed by the vastness of the landscape so as to demonstrate man's pathetic insignificance when compared to the boundlessness of God within nature, Baselitz's head dominates his hellish environment. In trying to tame nature, man has destroyed it.