The Defining Moments of Georg Baselitz at Age 80

by Daniel Bonnell

When approaching one of Baselitz’s massive up-side-down paintings you must be on guard. His art acts as walls to seeking and suffering, simplicity and complexity, and profound yet primal beauty. To think about it is to destroy it—one must simply be with the work and if any answers are sought it requires a spirit of humility because those answers may not come. His work reveals defining moments being human, being German in a post WWII era, and being an artist. The greatest defining moment that repeats itself throughout his life is that of taking risks at the cost of his complete career. They are risks that are built on a foundation of moving from think-ing to be-ing. Welcome to the pilgrimage of Georg Baselitz.

At age 80 Georg Baselitz is the leading protagonist of German post WWII art whose work never stops reinventing itself. To mark the eightieth birthday of Georg Baselitz, the Foundation Beyeler in Riehen (Basel, Switzerland) is devoting an extensive retrospective to the German painter, printmaker and sculptor, comprising his most important paintings and sculptures. The show juxtaposes key works from each phase of the artist’s oeuvre. The exhibition brings together some ninety paintings and twelve sculptures dating from 1959 to 2017. Exemplary works from the 1960s, with a selection of the Hero and Fracture paintings, are included among examples of the inverted images for which Baselitz became famous. Along with the artist’s large-format wood sculptures and reliefs, paintings from the later Remix series are also featured, as well as a new group of works, which is publicly displayed here for the first time. The retrospective debuts at the Fondation Beyeler and will be seen at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 2018.

--Q 1: You walked through one phase of personal and cultural trauma after another, beginning by being born in Germany just two years after WWII. You were born in East Germany and left to move to West Germany just a few months prior to the Berlin wall construction.

You were a victim to actual cultural guilt within Germany and you must have inherited false guilt for escaping in time to West Germany as the Berlin wall came up. Could it be that your massive paintings evolved into being walls that kept this false guilt out? Could it be that your visual vocabulary of innocent every day objects, portraits, figures, and elements became psychological walls not of concrete but canvas?   Perhaps your rejection of the conventional method of painting was a reaction, as if its own wall, to finding freedom within yourself that no one else could provide?

Georg Baselitz:

Walls are an integral part of our world, protective walls, dividing walls. For me, the cooking pot is always important, as a pressure vessel with steam whistle.

Painters are also artists, but unlike composers, they do not come without something visible - what they show in a picture. If a composer is in a bad mood or has a difficult past, or comes from a dubious world, you will not hear that in his music. It's different with painters, almost everything you see of them has something biographical. Pictures without these circumstances are hardly possible or imaginable. The psychological dilemma is not hidden.

--Q 2: There is a fearlessness in pushing the boundaries of your art. When initially viewing your work, it is as if the viewer stops for a moment to think about what they are viewing then the painting fails them. However, if the viewer simply sees without judgment then they are allowed into a secret, a glimpse of the unknown, a voyeuristic glimpse into someone’s personal suffering of their past. Am I off into the margins with these thoughts?

Georg Baselitz:

No, but the past does not necessarily have to be that terrible. I met Paul McCarthy for a conversation and asked him about his story, including the story of his country, America, he said America's history came from Hollywood, that he was born a Mormon, which was a big problem for him.

--Q 3: It is honest to say that your work cannot be defined with metaphors of words in that the mystery of seeing is seeing the mystery. Even attempting an interview is largely impossible because we can only write in a metaphorical dimension. I can only skim the surface of insight into your creative processes.  What are the patterns of your processes that float to the surface after 6 decades of creating? Do you yourself understand each work fully?

Georg Baselitz:

I do not paint and I'm not painted, nor does it paint with me. I have my thoughts very well together. My counterpart, my correspondent was my past and that is still the case today. In addition, there are many images over decades, which were very idiosyncratic and demanded a clear head.

--Q 4: Could you upack your sentence, “I do not paint and I’m not painted, nor does it paint with me.”  Perhaps I am losing the essence of your statement in translation?

Georg Baselitz:

There are many attempts to escape the essential. These unclear descriptions of what one does have led to very abstruse claims in recent decades. Like "I do not paint and and I'm not painted, nor does it paint me".

--Q 5: Many of your paintings beckon questions while others offer answers. Could it be that much of your work is born out of a realization of a benevolent awakening of the nature of the world as a reaction or epiphany to the path of cultural drama and trauma

that you were born into?

Georg Baselitz:

That, I believe, is not so, there is no therapeutic path for me, but there is my very hermetic world.

--Q 6: Would you therefore relate the hermetic practice of theurgy to being the act

of your painting with the goal of achieving henosis?

Georg Baselitz:

I do not quite understand what you mean, reconciliation with whom? Or with what? I mean to paint in this means of expression is a very historical visible thing and I am very interested. I think it's wonderful how Giotto painted and others have painted over the centuries. I can not recognize a philosophical, religious personal attitude of the painters in each case. I can only recognize that the respective past times are characterized by corresponding pictures. That does not mean better pictures, that does not mean worse pictures, that does not mean progress.

--Q 7: Does your up-side-down method becomes a bridge between the representational and the abstract as a condition of dialectics?

Georg Baselitz:

I am not aware of this condition. You can talk about pictures a lot when you see them in front of you. But when you create these pictures, everything looks very different. You make assertions and say that they are valid, the final conclusion of wisdom. It must be incomparable, such a picture and as incomprehensible as possible.

--Q 8: Your inverted work titled ‘Edvards Geist’ offers us a narrative of death, friendship, love and the ambiguity of life as spirit against a field of black as death. The inverted element adds a stronger dimension to the title, opposite transitional directions, etc. Can you unpack this painting for me and what it means to you on a personal level?

Georg Baselitz:

This spirit is the apparition of Edvard Munch. I found out that Munch was the first important painter who had a great influence on me, as early as 1959 I made drawings according to his model. In 1969 (reversal) there were many Munch quotations in my pictures, a dedication that can also be called Confession.

--Q 9: Along with Munch, within other works we see glimpses of Gorky and his use of vivid color depicting joy and innocence. Such a range of style presents itself as a form of honesty, a visual diary of a journey be it good or bad or melancholy. This is especially true in your Hero series. What is the foundation behind this raw honesty?

Georg Baselitz:

I think I use different models of a respective visual appearance, I mean not only the external with it, but also the models that are described in art history. What stands behind what is called content, motive however, consists of quotes that are characteristic of the artists you name. It's my 'congratulations'.

--Q 10: You turn 80 this year. Your work has survived the modern era, the post-modern era and the meta-modern era. Do you see your work as a visual journey of becoming?

Georg Baselitz:

A difficult question. First of all, I am driven, but I am also active. All reactions give pictures. My proclamations are pictures, my experiences too. Making discoveries while keeping logbooks about these pictures is important, in my case, 'log pictures'.

My news is not uninteresting for others, just like inverted pictures.

--Q 11:  You have been quoted stating that “The most intact world is the world of art.” Considering the deconstruct method of painting for the past several decades, how is the art world intact?

Georg Baselitz:

After all, art itself always rescues itself, remains preserved and visible to us. I often think of the pictures in the caves or catacombs. Destruction is also construction, if this mental instinct takes place approximately in the pictures.

--Q 12: There are no precedents for your wooden sculptures of busts. They appear to be prayers to the dead as victims of the war. Am I approaching their meaning?

Georg Baselitz:

These sculptures work, even if they are motionless, not Calders, they violently contradict the well-known ancestral sculptures of Picasso, Giacometti, de Kooning, etc. There are figurative wooden steles in Africa , eg Bongostelen or from the Giryama from Kenya, which I like very much.

--Q 13:  You state, “The idea of something being controllable is the most important factor to me. Not the subconscious or the visionary. Instead I’m interested in the controllable.” In light of this statement and your latest works depicting aging, transitioning and death, are you letting go of that control?

Georg Baselitz:

I do not think so. I do not know of a good example of letting go. I also work with myself as a counterpart with photos, these photos show me quite old. But it has actually become difficult to draw a straight line without trembling.

--Q 14:  Your Remix Series offer up a reconstruct as opposed to a deconstruct of

some of your most successful works. Frankly, I can’t think of anyone who has ever

done this before. Did you raise the works up to a higher level or did they simply become transformed into something else entirely?

Georg Baselitz:

Yeah, I mean, and I did different things at different times in the past, and I was very happy to find this solution remix from a dilemma I was in. There is the freedom everyone talks about, because they all want and do not have it, but I think this repetition with a new biology of the artist brings a lot of this freedom.

--Q 15: A comment you made in an interview with Der Spiegel in January 2013 - that women painters didn't pass the market value test and couldn't paint so well – was a comment that appears to have gone around the world for 5 years. After reading the question in its proper context I believe your answer was misunderstood as a prejudice against women artists.  As to what I felt you were saying is that it is a male dominated art world making it harder for women to rise to the top of the market. Am I correct in my assumption? Do you wish to clarify the statement?

Georg Baselitz:

I wrote a funny text about it. I put this in ***

--Q 16: You were born into an era of post WWII reconstruction. The oeuvre of embracing a deconstruct is in your DNA from a child. Your early Hero series is a lost young man who is searching for an identity in himself and his world as a result of this internal deconstruct. Am I correct in this assumption?

Georg Baselitz:

Here they say 'He cannot get out of his skin', they say DNA. But you should not forget that we Germans, since Nietzsche was born,  consider ourselves as 'over' or 'masters', playing the 'Aryan card'. This ideological nonsense had a beginning, - I think it has no end.

Images are generally subject to an aesthetic consideration between ugly and beautiful. In Germany the "degenerate art" was created.

--Q 17: Your desire to produce a series of bad paintings, as a young painter, gave birth to a scandalous reputation as an artist from the beginning via the works Die große Nacht im Eimer and Der nackte Mann.  You state now that you feel they were pathetic, pitiful and dirty. Then in 1969 you started inverting your work yet taking another major risk. The fact that these risks were made became defining moments for you. Is the dynamic of risk

an intuitive part of your creative process or do you map out a painting?

Georg Baselitz:

Even painters have nightmares that can put a lot of strain on them. And then you wake up and find yourself all normal again. I believe that my geography is in this dichotomy, both one and the other and the attempt to wipe out the first, the nightmares.

--Q 18: Could it be that you inverted your work as a form of protest against America’s rebuilding of Berlin post WWII with its capitalistic cultural influence also connecting the New York abstract expressionists that were dominating the art world in the 1960’s?

Georg Baselitz:

The exhibition at my school in Berlin in 1958 with American Abstract Expressionism resulted in my "Great Night in a Bucket". My foolish reaction in 1969 was the consequence of the iconoclasm of those years, - paper and canvas became unfit as medium.

--Q 18: Therefore, to be clear, inspite of your iconoclasm acting out, inverting your paintings was actually a statement of protest?

Georg Baselitz

No, it's not a protest, it's just an independent, enhanced way to make images of what we call reality. After all, it's possible to turn everything upside down and that makes sense. I found the American painting that I saw in 1958 magnificent, but you must understand that the path that led to these pictures was completely unknown to me. I simply did not have the information.

--Q 19: Your retrospective is presently in Washington D.C. at the Hirshorn. The politics and Executive branch are up-side-down (like your art), Americans are culturally divided.

This is an ironic stage for your work sitting in the heart of the nation’s capital.

Georg Baselitz:

Misuse is unavoidable, but there are no mistakes. My first pictures were, after all, 'in jail' ... I do not care, as is common with most Germans, to judge over presidents of other states.

--Q 20: Your latest series on the finality of life appear to be about transitioning. They appear to be exclaimation points into the mystery of death. Can you tell us what is behind the curtain?

Georg Baselitz:

I think there are pictures behind the curtain. Really only pictures and in these pictures are people, you can see them.

--Q 20: What expectations did you hold upon turning 80 and can you reflect on an artist that has led you?

Georg Baselitz:

You expect a high-altitude flight or maybe divine coincidence, I, however, have found a leader in Katsushika Hokusai.

--Q 21: Hokusai was certainly not afraid of growing old. He died at age 88, exclaiming on his deathbed, ‘If only Heaven will give me just another ten years... Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.’ His art continually took on a sacred dimension, as in the writings of the Desert Fathers or mystics within a mindfulness

form of visual zen. What do you hold sacred? What do you hold as your defining moments?

Georg Baselitz:

We have very different biographies in art history. Old and young, sick and healthy; also many artists we can not identify - if you think of the caves or the catacombs. I can not imagine that an artist thinks like maybe a scientist who has set himself the goal of blowing up the world with a bomb. I think of the artist as very tiny creatures in an overpowering everyday life and they never have the chance to do something really dominant. Actually, I see all art as a very positive and friendly thing in our world, and that's all it is and only what concerns me.

*** Men's art is women's art

Today I saw the Venus of Willendorf, we do not know who shaped it, man or woman. I saw the Venus of Botticelli in the shell, I see the Venus of Giorgione (without the monkey), the Venus of Titian with shirred hair, the Venus of Velasquez (from behind), the Venus of Goya with closed thighs and those behind the Head crossed arms (the Duchess of Alba), I see the Venus of Manet (breakfast in the open), the Venus of Rembrandt (Bathsheba), with the sculptors and their Venus, the many Venus of Cranach (with long hair and blue veins) or H. Rousseau's well-formed Venus in the jungle on the sofa - and all of these were done by men. Maybe it calms some that Venus ends up male.

The Venus of the sculptors, in turn, begins with the Venus of Willendorf, of which one does not know whether man or woman have formed her, the Alabaster goddesses, the Queen of Saba, the queer female idols of the Cyclades, the countless Aphrodites with hammer and chisel struck the marble, pure men's business such heavy work, and the many graces with Paris, and finally Pygmalion with his wife Venus.

How many Venus of Milo may there be? She also appears with Bertel Thorvaldsen. From Michelangelo to Rodin, magnificent beauties in bronze and marble. Sometime around 1900, the deformation begins, I do not believe that it has to do with the gender struggle, as William Rubin of Picasso says that the domestic problems have led to women with three eyes. I think it was easy enough with the stone beauties.

Georg Baselitz 23. VIII .2017  [unpubliziert/unpublished]

Dazu Photo von Georg Baselitz aufgenommen im Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke, München (August 2017) / Illustrated with Photographs by Baselitz taken at the Museum für Abgüsse Klassischer Bildwerke, Munich)