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Lot Essay
‘… Baselitz is really personifying the painter who, like himself, revolts against convention. Ultimately, these are self-portraits’ (Andreas Franzke)
Executed in vivid strokes of oilstick, gouache, pastel and pencil, Typ mit Fahne (Type with Flag) (1965) is a striking work on paper from one of Georg Baselitz’s most crucial early series. A towering, barefoot figure is aglow in vibrant orange tones, richly worked with white highlights and graphic scrawls of shadow. He wears an open shirt and ragged shorts, and lifts his gaze towards the sky. Behind him, merging with the whorled grey earth, is a fallen flag. He is one of the ‘Heroes’, also known as the ‘New Types’: iconic figures through which Baselitz pictured the wounded state of post-war Germany, and his own fraught identity as an artist in this cultural landscape. In 2007-2008, Typ mit Fahne was included in Drawing Connections: Baselitz, Kelly, Penone, Rockburne and the Old Masters at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York. It was paralleled there with a drawing by the sixteenth-century Italian Mannerist Parmigianino, a key influence on Baselitz’s work.
Baselitz’s ‘Heroes’ are youthful painters, poets, shepherds or soldiers who wander pastoral wastelands. With their tattered clothing and mortified bodies, they personify the state of a nation whose traditions, archetypes and ideals had been warped and broken. The forlorn flag motif seen in Typ mit Fahne features in a number of major ‘Hero’ paintings, including the climactic work Die großen Freunde (The Great Friends) (1965, Museum Ludwig, Cologne). As Eva Mongi-Vollmer observes, these ‘slack or discarded flags burden the protagonists instead of giving them support’ (E. Mongi-Vollmer, ‘Heroes Without Deployment. The Years of Creation, 1965-66’, in Georg Baselitz: The Heroes, exh. cat. Städel Museum, Frankfurt 2016, p. 23). For all their desolation, however, the ‘Heroes’ remain formally monumental, charged with a powerful presence through the sheer force of Baselitz’s mark-making.
Baselitz made a name for himself as a polemical painter in West Berlin during the early 1960s. His art embraced the grotesque, the unseemly and the ‘degenerate’ in a fierce reckoning with Germany’s recent history. His first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz in 1963 caused outcry, with two paintings, including the seminal work The Big Night Down the Drain (1962-1963), confiscated on the grounds of obscenity. He developed ideas from this period in the dreamlike scenery and distended figures of his 1964 ‘Saxon landscapes’. The ‘Heroes’ emerged the following year after his return from a six-month fellowship in Florence. Baselitz had been greatly impacted by the Mannerist paintings of artists such as Parmigianino, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, and channelled their sensuous, exaggerated figuration—often featuring small heads and oversized limbs—into his own work.
The ‘Heroes’ can also be seen as self-portraits, picturing Baselitz himself as an artist-martyr. Born in East Germany—in a village from which he later took his name, deliberately styling himself as an outsider after his move to the West—he felt that neither Soviet Socialist Realism nor Western abstraction were adequate modes of expression, and stubbornly forged his own path. Soon after the ‘Heroes’ came his radical ‘Fracture’ paintings and upside-down pictures, which furthered his exploration of formal and personal rupture. The figure in Typ mit Fahne is emblematic of Baselitz’s resolve. Damaged yet defiant, he remains standing. The fallen flag becomes part of a new terrain. ‘Destruction appears everywhere,’ Diane Waldman writes, ‘but the figure, a phoenix rising from the ashes, is a survivor. Into this image of a Romantic, melancholy spirit, one may project the artist himself, as wanderer, poet, and painter attached to his bit of earth’ (D. Waldman, ‘Georg Baselitz: Art on the Edge’, in Georg Baselitz, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1995, p. 38)
Executed in vivid strokes of oilstick, gouache, pastel and pencil, Typ mit Fahne (Type with Flag) (1965) is a striking work on paper from one of Georg Baselitz’s most crucial early series. A towering, barefoot figure is aglow in vibrant orange tones, richly worked with white highlights and graphic scrawls of shadow. He wears an open shirt and ragged shorts, and lifts his gaze towards the sky. Behind him, merging with the whorled grey earth, is a fallen flag. He is one of the ‘Heroes’, also known as the ‘New Types’: iconic figures through which Baselitz pictured the wounded state of post-war Germany, and his own fraught identity as an artist in this cultural landscape. In 2007-2008, Typ mit Fahne was included in Drawing Connections: Baselitz, Kelly, Penone, Rockburne and the Old Masters at the Morgan Library and Museum, New York. It was paralleled there with a drawing by the sixteenth-century Italian Mannerist Parmigianino, a key influence on Baselitz’s work.
Baselitz’s ‘Heroes’ are youthful painters, poets, shepherds or soldiers who wander pastoral wastelands. With their tattered clothing and mortified bodies, they personify the state of a nation whose traditions, archetypes and ideals had been warped and broken. The forlorn flag motif seen in Typ mit Fahne features in a number of major ‘Hero’ paintings, including the climactic work Die großen Freunde (The Great Friends) (1965, Museum Ludwig, Cologne). As Eva Mongi-Vollmer observes, these ‘slack or discarded flags burden the protagonists instead of giving them support’ (E. Mongi-Vollmer, ‘Heroes Without Deployment. The Years of Creation, 1965-66’, in Georg Baselitz: The Heroes, exh. cat. Städel Museum, Frankfurt 2016, p. 23). For all their desolation, however, the ‘Heroes’ remain formally monumental, charged with a powerful presence through the sheer force of Baselitz’s mark-making.
Baselitz made a name for himself as a polemical painter in West Berlin during the early 1960s. His art embraced the grotesque, the unseemly and the ‘degenerate’ in a fierce reckoning with Germany’s recent history. His first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz in 1963 caused outcry, with two paintings, including the seminal work The Big Night Down the Drain (1962-1963), confiscated on the grounds of obscenity. He developed ideas from this period in the dreamlike scenery and distended figures of his 1964 ‘Saxon landscapes’. The ‘Heroes’ emerged the following year after his return from a six-month fellowship in Florence. Baselitz had been greatly impacted by the Mannerist paintings of artists such as Parmigianino, Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino, and channelled their sensuous, exaggerated figuration—often featuring small heads and oversized limbs—into his own work.
The ‘Heroes’ can also be seen as self-portraits, picturing Baselitz himself as an artist-martyr. Born in East Germany—in a village from which he later took his name, deliberately styling himself as an outsider after his move to the West—he felt that neither Soviet Socialist Realism nor Western abstraction were adequate modes of expression, and stubbornly forged his own path. Soon after the ‘Heroes’ came his radical ‘Fracture’ paintings and upside-down pictures, which furthered his exploration of formal and personal rupture. The figure in Typ mit Fahne is emblematic of Baselitz’s resolve. Damaged yet defiant, he remains standing. The fallen flag becomes part of a new terrain. ‘Destruction appears everywhere,’ Diane Waldman writes, ‘but the figure, a phoenix rising from the ashes, is a survivor. Into this image of a Romantic, melancholy spirit, one may project the artist himself, as wanderer, poet, and painter attached to his bit of earth’ (D. Waldman, ‘Georg Baselitz: Art on the Edge’, in Georg Baselitz, exh. cat. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1995, p. 38)