The Gallery of Modern Art has an impressive collection of twentieth-century German art with important works by, for example, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde and Otto Dix. In 1987 the Gallery acquired Ernst Barlach’s oak carving The Terrible Year 1937 and more recently the holdings have been enriched with works by Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter through the ARTISTROOMS collection. In 1989, the addition of this roughly carved sculpture by Georg Baselitz was a brave but far-sighted move. Baselitz has always been a controversial figure, determined to challenge convention and to confront sensitivities surrounding Germany’s past and present. Inspired by African art, mediaeval carving and folk art, this partly heroic, partly absurd figure often invokes powerful reactions from our audiences.
From the outset, Baselitz cast himself as an outsider. He was born Hans-Georg Kern in Grossbaselitz, a village near Dresden in Saxony. After enrolling at the academy in East Berlin in 1956 he was soon expelled for ‘political immaturity’ and left for West Berlin, where he changed his name to Baselitz after his birthplace. During his student years in West Berlin, he distanced himself from the dominant modes of Pop Art and abstract expressionist painting. Instead he looked to art brut, the art of the mentally disturbed, and to sixteenth-century German woodcuts for inspiration. His canvases of the 1960s are peopled with distorted, fractured human forms that seem to emerge like survivors from the ruins of his shattered country. Using mixtures of muddy greys, browns and livid yellows he painted heroic figures who stumble through landscapes strewn with rubble and blasted trees. Famously, from 1969 onwards he began to paint his portraits, figures and landscapes upside down, turning painting on its head in an effort, he said, to ‘liberate representation from content’.
Baselitz began to make sculptures in the late 1970s, and although they are far fewer in number than his paintings they have been no less controversial. At the Venice Biennale of 1980 he showed a wooden carving of a reclining man, daubed with red and black paint, his arm raised in what was taken to be a Nazi-style salute. Although Baselitz insisted that the elevated arm was inspired by African tribal sculpture, in the context of a German pavilion built during the Nazi era, the work caused uproar. This was followed by a sequence of standing figures including our piece which dates from 1982–4. Baselitz would create his sculptures from a single tree, using a chainsaw and axe to hack out the figure in what he described as an ‘aggressive’ process. The deliberately crude, rough-hewn style links these works to carvings by the German Expressionists, especially Kirchner, and before that to earlier traditions of German woodcarving. They were clearly inspired by African art (Baselitz eventually amassed a significant collection of tribal sculpture), and the simple colours smeared over the most prominent body parts have the quality of ritualistic body painting. Baselitz said that by working in wood, he wanted ‘to avoid all manual dexterity, all artistic elegance, everything to do with construction’. As Baselitz would have realised, that gesture of the raised arm remains ambiguous for a modern audience; but his simple, totemic figure has a primordial quality, appearing more like a time-worn sacred object than as a modern sculpture.
This text was originally published in 100 Masterpieces: National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2015.