.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
'The object expresses nothing at all. Painting is not a means to an end. On the contrary, painting is autonomous. And I said to myself; if this is the case, then I must take everything which has been an object of painting - landscape, the portrait and the nude, for example - and paint it upside-down. That is the best way to liberate representation from content.' (Georg Baselitz cited in Baselitz, Franz Dahlem, Cologne, 1990, p. 88)
Formerly in the Herbig Collection, Kopfbild Dogge (Head Portrait of a Great Dane) is one of a series of portrait paintings of dogs that Baselitz painted shortly after settling on the radical notion of the painting his images upside-down in 1969. The dog portraits, like his landscape paintings and pictures of eagles, are among the first of his paintings to explore the upside-down method that has become the artist's signature style.
Painted in a controlled, realistic painterly style with a degree of naturalism and precision that later disappeared from his work, these early paintings reveal the artist tentatively exploring the radical upside-down world his art has generated. These groundbreaking paintings and the decision to invert the motif were the culmination of over a year of struggle in which Baselitz had fragmented his images in order to attempt to break away from what the artist increasingly felt was the tyranny of the painting's content. 'I decided in 1969, or from 1969 onwards,' Baselitz has recalled, 'to dispense with narrative content and deal only with the things that painting normally uses; landscape, the nude, the portrait, the still-life and so forth. That is a decision which defines a certain path and has a constricting effect. But in terms of the overall image, I think it pays off ...What I wanted, was quite simply to find a way of making pictures, perhaps with a new sense of detachment. That's all. If the motif is drained of all content - whatever kind of content it may be - then I can paint anything. That was the point of the inversion. And that's what I did.' (Baselitz op. cit., p. 94 and p. 29).
Alongside the paintings of inverted landscapes and swooping eagles, one of the first 'normal' subjects Baselitz turned to was the dog and in particular, the Dogge or Great Dane breed that he himself has kept for many years. In Kopfbild Dogge, Baselitz portrays the head of a Great Dane peering over a wire fence while being held by the collar by a braceleted arm that mirrors the dog's spotted snout. The bold, butch imagery of the painting here seems to reflect the assertiveness and vigour of Baseltiz's painterly technique - a technique which strikingly asserts the very material presence of the paint as a dramatic record of the almost arbitrary activity of the artist on the surface of the canvas.
Formerly in the Herbig Collection, Kopfbild Dogge (Head Portrait of a Great Dane) is one of a series of portrait paintings of dogs that Baselitz painted shortly after settling on the radical notion of the painting his images upside-down in 1969. The dog portraits, like his landscape paintings and pictures of eagles, are among the first of his paintings to explore the upside-down method that has become the artist's signature style.
Painted in a controlled, realistic painterly style with a degree of naturalism and precision that later disappeared from his work, these early paintings reveal the artist tentatively exploring the radical upside-down world his art has generated. These groundbreaking paintings and the decision to invert the motif were the culmination of over a year of struggle in which Baselitz had fragmented his images in order to attempt to break away from what the artist increasingly felt was the tyranny of the painting's content. 'I decided in 1969, or from 1969 onwards,' Baselitz has recalled, 'to dispense with narrative content and deal only with the things that painting normally uses; landscape, the nude, the portrait, the still-life and so forth. That is a decision which defines a certain path and has a constricting effect. But in terms of the overall image, I think it pays off ...What I wanted, was quite simply to find a way of making pictures, perhaps with a new sense of detachment. That's all. If the motif is drained of all content - whatever kind of content it may be - then I can paint anything. That was the point of the inversion. And that's what I did.' (Baselitz op. cit., p. 94 and p. 29).
Alongside the paintings of inverted landscapes and swooping eagles, one of the first 'normal' subjects Baselitz turned to was the dog and in particular, the Dogge or Great Dane breed that he himself has kept for many years. In Kopfbild Dogge, Baselitz portrays the head of a Great Dane peering over a wire fence while being held by the collar by a braceleted arm that mirrors the dog's spotted snout. The bold, butch imagery of the painting here seems to reflect the assertiveness and vigour of Baseltiz's painterly technique - a technique which strikingly asserts the very material presence of the paint as a dramatic record of the almost arbitrary activity of the artist on the surface of the canvas.