Echoes of Conflict: The Life and Legacy of Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz, the German artist who lived through Nazism and communism and whose horrific, shaming works forced his country to confront its past, has died at the age of 88. His death robs us of a living thread of history and the truth he knew, which we need more than ever.
Baselitz was born in 1938, making him too young for personal guilt but old enough to retain direct experience of the Third Reich. In his art, he cut up those images, goring and eviscerating them in paintings of uniformed young enthusiasts with blood spurting from mangled limbs or entire bodies fed through a hellish grinder and roughly remade. These ironically titled 'Heroes' went into the woods, chopping and being chopped in the guilty depths of the German forest.
Confronting Historical Shame
In every drop of paint Baselitz slurped and streaked, it is hard to avoid seeing the Holocaust. He absolutely recognized the shadow of history in his art. At the start of the 1960s, Baselitz, who had experienced both Hitler and East German communism before crossing to the west, horrified a postwar West Germany that was trying to forget with obscene images of a rancid, shameful society.
His 1961 painting Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain) depicts a stunted character with flattened black Hitlerian hair and the hint of a square moustache, nude except for military-looking shorts, masturbating. In a later reworking, he made the masturbator's identity even clearer. Baselitz would go on to paint upside-down German eagles as if flying above an infernal Berchtesgaden, and carve a huge rough-hewn, polychrome wooden statue of a saluting Adolf who rises from a recumbent position like a mummy waking from its tomb.
Provocation at the Venice Biennale
He put his zombie Hitler woodcarving in the German Pavilion at the 1980 Venice Biennale, in a joint show with the similarly history-cursed Anselm Kiefer. They were accused by some of being fascistic, but it was a misunderstanding: the German Pavilion in Venice is a Nazi-era neoclassical building inscribed Germania, so instead of tastefully ignoring that grotesque heritage, Baselitz and Kiefer set out to rub everyone's noses in it, insisting that Europe must always remember its big night down the drain.
Later Life and Vulnerability
Baselitz loved to provoke and can be quoted to sound like someone he was not. He supposedly slighted female painters but in reality was a fan of Tracey Emin. In fact, he was the opposite of some stereotypical Teutonic macho artist. His late work portrayed himself and his wife Elke nude, as vulnerable, decaying old people, or even as dying bodies. He even made art recently using his walker.
When told how moving these images of human frailty were, he asked if it was thought that only now he was doing his best work. He also recounted sitting with his family in the Wolsey and watching Lucian Freud come in with a young woman but being too shy to say hello. He had much in common with Freud and Frank Auerbach as a painter of bodies and memories, both of which can so easily be destroyed.
Baselitz was an artist who never lost touch with the thin, frail, human truth. He was a hero in his own way.
