Hanna

Included in the artist’s landmark first American retrospective, which opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, in 1995—and in his 2006 survey at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek—Hanna (1992) is a vibrant example of Georg Baselitz’s early-1990s paintings. During this period Baselitz entered what he called an ‘ornamental’ phase, creating works with distinct illusional layers that combined graphic and painterly energy. In an article from 2013, Baselitz included Hanna among his twenty favourite paintings in his oeuvre. It depicts a pair of legs upside-down, in the artist’s signature mode. They are painted in black on a white ground, and overlaid with thick daubs of red, green, blue, yellow and black, which—Baselitz noted—echo the features of a face. It is one of a group of works he made in 1992 in his studio in Imperia, Italy, that he titled with women’s names. Several of these are in major museum collections: Bruna is in the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and Olga and Lena are both in the Albertina, Vienna. Hanna has been held in the same private collection for more than three decades.

Begun in 1969, Baselitz’s first inverted pictures had depicted pastoral motifs in earthy colours, reflecting the historical rupture of post-war Germany. By the early 1990s he was deploying his motifs with a new formal and chromatic freedom, partly informed by the art of the Italian Quattrocento. He had been dividing his time between Germany and Italy since 1981, and in 1987 established his studio in Imperia on the Ligurian coast. Most of the works from the series to which Hanna belongs feature a woman’s face in white, painted or incised into black pigment. They are further adorned with impasto swathes of white or primary hues, like colours on an artist’s palette. Their splashed application reflects Baselitz’s new practice of painting on the floor: in Hanna, they also bear the mark of the artist’s fingers. The titles imbue each work with a distinctive sense of character. Baselitz had previously used women’s names for some of his Dresdner Frauen (Women of Dresden) sculptures of 1989-1990, which commemorated the women who helped to rebuild Dresden after the bombing of World War II.

Hanna stands out among the group in its depiction of a pair of legs, rather than a face. The motif of the leg or foot recurs in Baselitz’s work from the 1960s through to the present day. In his seminal P. D. Feet series of 1963, they are visceral symbols of uprooted identity and national trauma. In his Ekely and Lagerplatz paintings and Pace Piece sculptures of the early 2000s, disembodied legs wander through time and place as a metonym for Baselitz himself, linking him to a photograph of Edvard Munch in his studio. Baselitz’s own footprints can be seen dancing across many canvases of the early 1990s, tracing his movements as he works from above in the manner of Jackson Pollock—another of his artistic heroes. Hanna might equally be seen to echo the great Abstract Expressionist’s bravado drip technique, transforming the canvas into an arena for looping, gestural expression. Exuberant, free and resolutely individual, the painting exemplifies Baselitz’s continual reinvention of himself and of his favourite subjects.