Georg Baselitz

The show curated in the large exhibition hall by Harald Szeemann included 70 pictures and 5 sculptures of the artist Georg Baselitz, born in Deutschbaselitz as Hans-Georg Kern in 1938. Szeemann wrote apodictically of him: ‘His pictures are battle images for an art without narrative and anecdote, without illustration and message. Art as Art.’ But there is a lot of narrative in Baselitz himself – this figure heroized by the art industry with a ‘volcanic temperament,’ whom the public ‘acclaims with the highest awards, publications and exhibitions like no other German’ (Neue Zürcher Zeitung). In the 1950s he studied at the Weissensee Art School in East Berlin until he was expelled. After that he settled in the West, where he assumed his present name in 1961. In 1963, the West Berlin prosecutor's office seized two ‘obscene’ pictures of naked men with huge private parts (including ‘Die grosse Nacht im Eimer’ (The Big Night Down the Drain) 1962/63, now in the Museum Ludwig, Cologne). The principle of reversal followed in 1969: since then, all his pictures have been hung upside down. The widely noticed Zurich exhibition in the Kunsthaus took place two years after Baselitz’s fiftieth birthday, which had been richly celebrated in museums in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Bremen. The success of the exhibition was overshadowed by an extremely forceful controversy about the sale of two Renoirs from the collection, which was announced at the opening, and which was conducted to finance the purchase of the 20-part work ‘45’ for the sum of two million US dollars. The title refers to a fateful year for Germany, 1945, and the work was created in another fateful year, shortly before the fall of the Iron Curtain, between July and September 1989. The Kunsthaus was sure of one thing: On the cover of the accompanying publication this very work was to be seen, namely in a not very attractive atelier photograph with a back view of the artist in a leather sofa. Even though in some places criticism of the rather sect-like reception of Baselitz was uttered (Harald Szeemann’s introductory text is completely without irony when it refers to the ‘agonal creation’), the overall assessment was positive. For example, the art critic Eduard Beaucamp called it, ‘a magnificent, even Olympian show.’ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)