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Lot Essay
Georg Baselitz has done for the linocut what must have seemed impossible less than a decade ago: he has revitalized the simplest and most primitive of printmaking techniques and reinvested it with an extraordinarily expressive power that was last demonstrated by Picasso in the early 1960s. The process by which this transformation has taken place Is remarkably similar to the manner in which artists like Johns, Rauschenberg, and Stella came to exercise a masterful control over the techniques of lithography and etchings. Baselitz had been a painter-printmaker in the early part of his career and, more often than not, was prone to use etching as a direct extension of his work in drawing and painting. But an awareness of the power of the medium gradually developed from a number of sources, not least important the German tradition of graphic excellence. As his own increasing experience began to produce valuable insights, he began to view printmaking as a fully viable mode of expression in and of itself, and not in terms of how it related to his other work.
Breakthroughs began to occur for Baselitz in the early 1970s. He had cut something of an independent figure in Germany in the previous decade with a style of work that he referred to as Stil Malerei (‘style-painting’’), whose figurative and expressive elements were totally opposed to the current conceptual climate. Despite the huge success that the various European expressionist modes have enjoyed in recent years, however, Baselitz remains something of an enigma as a result of his tactic of literally inverting the subject matter in his work.
Baselitz’s most sophisticated linocuts began to surface in 1975 and 1976, when the expanded scale of his work pushed him to the frontier of the medium. To cut linoleum of such size requires bold and decisive strokes that lend an atmosphere of energy and power to the prints. The sheer practical problems posed by inking and printing linoleum sheets as large as two meters have been turned into assets on several fronts. His manner of inking such large surfaces—rolling the linoleum with heavy oil- based paint and moving the ink around with his hands and fingers—have made the linocuts as grand in conception as the most dignified painting, for the ink of the printed image has a three-dimensional quality that adds to its dramatic tension.
Used in concert with the enigmatic attitude of the upside-down figure, these working methods tap the sources of German expressionism and mysticism. The power of the imagery is a result of an intimate and intuitive sense of the medium that is a requirement of all great printmakers; that Baselitz has achieved such insight with a printmaking technique that was hardly legitimate in the eyes of most artists and writers only a few years ago serves to underscore the importance of his achievement.
Thomas Krens, Museum of Fine Arts; The Modern Art of the Print: Selections from the Collection of Lois and Michael Torf, p.128
Breakthroughs began to occur for Baselitz in the early 1970s. He had cut something of an independent figure in Germany in the previous decade with a style of work that he referred to as Stil Malerei (‘style-painting’’), whose figurative and expressive elements were totally opposed to the current conceptual climate. Despite the huge success that the various European expressionist modes have enjoyed in recent years, however, Baselitz remains something of an enigma as a result of his tactic of literally inverting the subject matter in his work.
Baselitz’s most sophisticated linocuts began to surface in 1975 and 1976, when the expanded scale of his work pushed him to the frontier of the medium. To cut linoleum of such size requires bold and decisive strokes that lend an atmosphere of energy and power to the prints. The sheer practical problems posed by inking and printing linoleum sheets as large as two meters have been turned into assets on several fronts. His manner of inking such large surfaces—rolling the linoleum with heavy oil- based paint and moving the ink around with his hands and fingers—have made the linocuts as grand in conception as the most dignified painting, for the ink of the printed image has a three-dimensional quality that adds to its dramatic tension.
Used in concert with the enigmatic attitude of the upside-down figure, these working methods tap the sources of German expressionism and mysticism. The power of the imagery is a result of an intimate and intuitive sense of the medium that is a requirement of all great printmakers; that Baselitz has achieved such insight with a printmaking technique that was hardly legitimate in the eyes of most artists and writers only a few years ago serves to underscore the importance of his achievement.
Thomas Krens, Museum of Fine Arts; The Modern Art of the Print: Selections from the Collection of Lois and Michael Torf, p.128