Like ‘Volkstanz Marode’, this painting belongs to the series of works called ‘Streubilder’ (‘Scatter Paintings’) or ‘Ciao America’, that Baselitz painted in the first half of 1989. The work has the same all-over distribution of form (birds, in this case) and unifying background colour as ‘Volkstanz’. There is also a similar primitivist, expressionist brushwork and folkloric subject matter, that marks them both out as unapologetically European, as opposed to the (on the whole) cooler, conceptual approach of American artists at the time. Hence the title of some of Baselitz’s contemporary paintings, ‘Ciao America’.