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拍品专文
“My work broke with all the conventions. I rebelled against all forms of restraint”—Georg Baselitz
An exemplary canvas typical of his most celebrated work, Georg Baselitz’s Strandbild #9 purposefully parts ways with German Expressionist traditions in favor of a more concrete investigation of physical media and its place in our world. Using the upturned figure as an entry point, the viewer can quickly navigate the artist’s dynamic gestures as they are pulled through the composition. Characterized by a uniquely contrarian practice that turns tradition on its head, Georg Baselitz has continuously pushed the boundaries of painting as a medium. Throughout his storied career, the artist has vehemently dissociated himself from historical tropes, going so far as to note: “My work broke with all the conventions. I rebelled against all forms of restraint. If people said you could only use this kind of paper or that brush for watercolor, I tried to do exactly the opposite. It was like trying to do a charcoal drawing with a pencil on a piece of glass” (G. Baselitz, quoted in F. Dahlem, “An Imaginary Conversation Between Baselitz, Dahlem and Pickshaus,” Georg Baselitz, Derneburg, 1990, p. 25). Unseen in public for over forty years while it has remained in the same private collection, this re-discovery embraces the Modernist ideologies centered around materiality and the exploration of color, form, and surface. In Strandbild #9, Baselitz probes the interstitial area between representation and pure abstraction.
Painted just one year after Baselitz’s participation in the West German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the present example is a particularly striking entry in his Strandbild (Beach Paintings) series of 1980-81. Characterized by an increasing eschewal of forthright representation in favor of inquiries into the painting’s objecthood, this canvas disintegrates the figure so that one is not sure where body stops and brushwork begins. As Baselitz has noted in the past, “there are people, serious people, who have argued about representation and non-representation and who have persistently linked the two to some notion of progress. To me, that is already decidedly a mistake, because the problem is located somewhere else entirely. The problem is not the object in the picture, but the picture as an object' (G. Baselitz, interview with H. Schwerfel, D. Gretenkort, Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, London, 2010, p. 184). Inhabiting a nebulous area between image and entity, Strandbild #9 persistently questions its own existence.
Bursting with vibrant color, Strandbild #9 is a vigorous testament to Baselitz’s handling of paint and canvas on a basic, physical level. Always seeking to distance himself from the past, the artist noted about his work in the early 1980s, “People were starting to say that my works had a link with German Expressionism. In fact this only applies to the way I handle the canvas, my manual use of the canvas”, he asserted. “I have never had any relationship with Expressionism” (G. Baselitz, quoted in D. Waldman, Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1995, p. 149). Though a passing resemblance to the artists of Die Brücke is noticeable, works like Strandbild #9 are less about capturing an emotional charge in the depiction of a scene or figure. Instead, Baselitz uses the human form as the anchor for an exploration of his process. Ensconced on all sides by varying shades of red, the central figure here is rendered in scumbled black strokes that coax recognizable forms out of energetic applications of orange, blue, white, and yellow paint. The head, with its pronounced face and shock of hair, is linked to a skeletal assemblage of lines and the outline of a hand that appears amidst this field of emphatic brushwork. Representative of the signature style of Baselitz’s later work, the body dissolves into its surroundings as recognizable form is replaced by a studied application of visceral paint in densely packed layers.
In 1969, Baselitz began painting his subjects upside down in an effort to prioritize the painted surface and materials. Throughout the 1970s, this emphasis on the physical properties of the work itself grew as he explored the motifs from his early career in increasingly experimental manners. It was in the 1980s that Baselitz made a shift in favor of subject matter again, but these new works are marked for their intensely worked compositions, dense handling of paint, and the melding of painterly abstract techniques with only a secondary regard for subject. “From 1981 onwards, Baselitz markedly intensifies the expressivity of his work. He no longer subordinates the motif to a dynamism rooted in gestural impulses and leading to more or less radical disregard of representational criteria, but pursues a process of concentration. This is sometimes realized in an extremely unconventional way. Baselitz simplifies his representations, and the figures become bulkier, more succinct in their proportions and general aspect, one might even say more primitive” (A. Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich 1989, p. 156). Already freed from the constraints of gravity, figures like those in Strandbild #9 give in to the emphatic nature of their surroundings as they are overtaken by the viscosity of paint.
An exemplary canvas typical of his most celebrated work, Georg Baselitz’s Strandbild #9 purposefully parts ways with German Expressionist traditions in favor of a more concrete investigation of physical media and its place in our world. Using the upturned figure as an entry point, the viewer can quickly navigate the artist’s dynamic gestures as they are pulled through the composition. Characterized by a uniquely contrarian practice that turns tradition on its head, Georg Baselitz has continuously pushed the boundaries of painting as a medium. Throughout his storied career, the artist has vehemently dissociated himself from historical tropes, going so far as to note: “My work broke with all the conventions. I rebelled against all forms of restraint. If people said you could only use this kind of paper or that brush for watercolor, I tried to do exactly the opposite. It was like trying to do a charcoal drawing with a pencil on a piece of glass” (G. Baselitz, quoted in F. Dahlem, “An Imaginary Conversation Between Baselitz, Dahlem and Pickshaus,” Georg Baselitz, Derneburg, 1990, p. 25). Unseen in public for over forty years while it has remained in the same private collection, this re-discovery embraces the Modernist ideologies centered around materiality and the exploration of color, form, and surface. In Strandbild #9, Baselitz probes the interstitial area between representation and pure abstraction.
Painted just one year after Baselitz’s participation in the West German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the present example is a particularly striking entry in his Strandbild (Beach Paintings) series of 1980-81. Characterized by an increasing eschewal of forthright representation in favor of inquiries into the painting’s objecthood, this canvas disintegrates the figure so that one is not sure where body stops and brushwork begins. As Baselitz has noted in the past, “there are people, serious people, who have argued about representation and non-representation and who have persistently linked the two to some notion of progress. To me, that is already decidedly a mistake, because the problem is located somewhere else entirely. The problem is not the object in the picture, but the picture as an object' (G. Baselitz, interview with H. Schwerfel, D. Gretenkort, Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, London, 2010, p. 184). Inhabiting a nebulous area between image and entity, Strandbild #9 persistently questions its own existence.
Bursting with vibrant color, Strandbild #9 is a vigorous testament to Baselitz’s handling of paint and canvas on a basic, physical level. Always seeking to distance himself from the past, the artist noted about his work in the early 1980s, “People were starting to say that my works had a link with German Expressionism. In fact this only applies to the way I handle the canvas, my manual use of the canvas”, he asserted. “I have never had any relationship with Expressionism” (G. Baselitz, quoted in D. Waldman, Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1995, p. 149). Though a passing resemblance to the artists of Die Brücke is noticeable, works like Strandbild #9 are less about capturing an emotional charge in the depiction of a scene or figure. Instead, Baselitz uses the human form as the anchor for an exploration of his process. Ensconced on all sides by varying shades of red, the central figure here is rendered in scumbled black strokes that coax recognizable forms out of energetic applications of orange, blue, white, and yellow paint. The head, with its pronounced face and shock of hair, is linked to a skeletal assemblage of lines and the outline of a hand that appears amidst this field of emphatic brushwork. Representative of the signature style of Baselitz’s later work, the body dissolves into its surroundings as recognizable form is replaced by a studied application of visceral paint in densely packed layers.
In 1969, Baselitz began painting his subjects upside down in an effort to prioritize the painted surface and materials. Throughout the 1970s, this emphasis on the physical properties of the work itself grew as he explored the motifs from his early career in increasingly experimental manners. It was in the 1980s that Baselitz made a shift in favor of subject matter again, but these new works are marked for their intensely worked compositions, dense handling of paint, and the melding of painterly abstract techniques with only a secondary regard for subject. “From 1981 onwards, Baselitz markedly intensifies the expressivity of his work. He no longer subordinates the motif to a dynamism rooted in gestural impulses and leading to more or less radical disregard of representational criteria, but pursues a process of concentration. This is sometimes realized in an extremely unconventional way. Baselitz simplifies his representations, and the figures become bulkier, more succinct in their proportions and general aspect, one might even say more primitive” (A. Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich 1989, p. 156). Already freed from the constraints of gravity, figures like those in Strandbild #9 give in to the emphatic nature of their surroundings as they are overtaken by the viscosity of paint.