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Lot Essay
‘I set out to formulate things as if I were the first one, the only one, and as if all the precedents didn’t exist—even though I know that there are thousands of precedents ranged against me’ (Georg Baselitz)
Towering over three metres high, Nicht ich, er ist es (Not me, it’s him) (2018) is a monumental late work by Georg Baselitz. We see a ghostly nude figure from behind against a pitch-black backdrop, treading up a transparent staircase. In the artist’s signature style, the image is upside-down. Baselitz applied the figure in thick, palette-knifed swathes of off-white oil paint: drips and splashes sparkle like stars in the surrounding darkness. He then scrawled dark lines into the pale impasto before washing it with a haze of dilute pigment, creating a golden, spectral effect. Closely related to Baselitz’s Avignon paintings (2014)—a group of eight gigantic nude self-portraits presented to great acclaim at the 2015 Venice Biennale—the work is a powerful meditation on mortality from an ageing artist. It also offers a typically irreverent take on art history, riffing on Marcel Duchamp’s canonical Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 of 1912.
With the human body as a vehicle, Baselitz has achieved multiple radical revisions of painting since the dawn of his career in 1960s West Berlin. The grotesque nudes he exhibited in 1963 led to an obscenity trial. His colossal, broken ‘Heroes’ of 1965-1966 were archetypes of the state of the nation. His first upside-down pictures followed in 1969, asking how much damage an image could take before the relationships between paint, form and meaning fell apart. Expanding from painting into sculpture and large-scale printmaking, he continued to test the possibilities of inversion, rupture and reinvention over the ensuing decades. Since the turn of the millennium he has worked in a reflective mode, reprising motifs from his past and increasingly placing himself in the picture. The fluid, graphic painterly style that characterises these recent works evokes Willem de Kooning’s near-dissolutions of the human figure, while their attenuated palettes approach a metaphysical or even spiritual quality.
Baselitz, however, has not softened in his old age. Alongside its elegiac attitude, Nicht ich, er ist es sees him continues to wage war on an artist whose work he despises: Marcel Duchamp. Baselitz had already mocked Duchamp’s persona in a series of humorous portrayals of him with his chambermaid dating from 1999 and 2007. He considers Duchamp’s denunciation of ‘retinal’ art to be ludicrous, and his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 a mere second-rate copy of Picasso. While that work was later seen as marking an end to painting itself, he notes, it has in fact fuelled new paintings by subsequent artists, including Gerhard Richter’s famous Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) (Ema (Nude on a Staircase)) of 1966. In his own constant striving for subjectivity and expression, Baselitz is fiercely opposed to Duchamp’s conceptual stance.
Baselitz has always been energised by working against or through his opponents, and has continued to paint undeterred throughout an era in which his medium has been declared dead more than once. In 2018, the year he made the present work, he celebrated his eightieth birthday. Solo exhibitions were held in his honour at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, France. In Nicht ich, er ist es, his fire shows no sign of dimming. One of the picture’s ironies is that it is only through Baselitz’s inversion that the figure appears to descend: he is in fact climbing up the stairs, ascending towards an endless unknown.
Towering over three metres high, Nicht ich, er ist es (Not me, it’s him) (2018) is a monumental late work by Georg Baselitz. We see a ghostly nude figure from behind against a pitch-black backdrop, treading up a transparent staircase. In the artist’s signature style, the image is upside-down. Baselitz applied the figure in thick, palette-knifed swathes of off-white oil paint: drips and splashes sparkle like stars in the surrounding darkness. He then scrawled dark lines into the pale impasto before washing it with a haze of dilute pigment, creating a golden, spectral effect. Closely related to Baselitz’s Avignon paintings (2014)—a group of eight gigantic nude self-portraits presented to great acclaim at the 2015 Venice Biennale—the work is a powerful meditation on mortality from an ageing artist. It also offers a typically irreverent take on art history, riffing on Marcel Duchamp’s canonical Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 of 1912.
With the human body as a vehicle, Baselitz has achieved multiple radical revisions of painting since the dawn of his career in 1960s West Berlin. The grotesque nudes he exhibited in 1963 led to an obscenity trial. His colossal, broken ‘Heroes’ of 1965-1966 were archetypes of the state of the nation. His first upside-down pictures followed in 1969, asking how much damage an image could take before the relationships between paint, form and meaning fell apart. Expanding from painting into sculpture and large-scale printmaking, he continued to test the possibilities of inversion, rupture and reinvention over the ensuing decades. Since the turn of the millennium he has worked in a reflective mode, reprising motifs from his past and increasingly placing himself in the picture. The fluid, graphic painterly style that characterises these recent works evokes Willem de Kooning’s near-dissolutions of the human figure, while their attenuated palettes approach a metaphysical or even spiritual quality.
Baselitz, however, has not softened in his old age. Alongside its elegiac attitude, Nicht ich, er ist es sees him continues to wage war on an artist whose work he despises: Marcel Duchamp. Baselitz had already mocked Duchamp’s persona in a series of humorous portrayals of him with his chambermaid dating from 1999 and 2007. He considers Duchamp’s denunciation of ‘retinal’ art to be ludicrous, and his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 a mere second-rate copy of Picasso. While that work was later seen as marking an end to painting itself, he notes, it has in fact fuelled new paintings by subsequent artists, including Gerhard Richter’s famous Ema (Akt auf einer Treppe) (Ema (Nude on a Staircase)) of 1966. In his own constant striving for subjectivity and expression, Baselitz is fiercely opposed to Duchamp’s conceptual stance.
Baselitz has always been energised by working against or through his opponents, and has continued to paint undeterred throughout an era in which his medium has been declared dead more than once. In 2018, the year he made the present work, he celebrated his eightieth birthday. Solo exhibitions were held in his honour at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar, France. In Nicht ich, er ist es, his fire shows no sign of dimming. One of the picture’s ironies is that it is only through Baselitz’s inversion that the figure appears to descend: he is in fact climbing up the stairs, ascending towards an endless unknown.