Georg Baselitz, who died this year, left behind an exhibition in London of his most astonishing history paintings, The Heroes, which he helped plan. The German painter, born in 1938, experienced Hitler's Germany and the second world war as a child, grew up in communist East Germany, and escaped to the west to become an artist. His acidic, honest perceptions of the history he lived through are now preserved in this exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac, London.
A Savage Vision of Modern History
The series presents a merciless vision of modern history, with horror, disgust and irreparable guilt hanging heavy in the poisoned air. There is also a terrible joy, the thrill of speaking the truth. Baselitz began these colossal imaginary portraits in 1965, and the explosive rage and nihilism of the art has been compared to punk, though the title of the series is so scathingly ironic it feels like being spat at.
One painting, Mit Rote Fahne (With the Red Banner), depicts a massive, square-shouldered yet exhausted soldier holding a half-lowered flag that is a smear of red and black. The redness congeals to form black scabs suggesting the shadow of the swastika. The devastated world at his feet was destroyed by Germany's heroes who fought in the second world war. When Baselitz painted these furious homages in the mid-1960s, these men were running West Germany's banks and car companies.
Confronting Germany's Shame
Another long-haired Hero, in a uniform with shorts, stands in a trashed, blood-stained landscape. This bland-faced character balances two crimson mittens, preparing to let them go and live on without these gory encumbrances, with clean hands. The paintings seem to scream that the Holocaust only ended 20 years ago, when armies discovered the places where six million Jews were systematically murdered, and ask how Germans could hold their heads high.
Baselitz and his artistic peers Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer, all of whom face German history head on, were sometimes accused by critics of glorifying it, but there is no hint of Teutonic grandeur here. In Ein Moderner Maler (A Modern Painter), Baselitz depicts an artist who cannot work because both hands are caught in man-traps. He sits defeated on the ground in military-looking clothes with armbands, as guilty and mad as all the other Heroes. He literally spills his guts in a parody of inner angst, with a curl of intestines between his legs and another section of bowel emerging from his side to become a spiralling pig's tail. His hair is flattened and he has a hint of a square moustache to remind viewers that Hitler, too, fancied himself an artist.
Unique Figuration and Lasting Impact
Baselitz reserves his deepest disgust for his own artistic mastery, with these paintings saying that painting has been smashed and is no longer possible. Their uncoordinated, lumpen figures look like Frankensteinian monsters, made from bits and pieces of mud and flesh pathetically sewn together. One soldier, sitting under the trees, has a square head on top of a slumped, square body as blood drips on his head from two branches. He is a ghost inside his garments.
This way of depicting the human figure makes Baselitz unique. He has little in common with British postwar figurative artists such as Bacon and Freud, for whom there is always a real, pulsing body they try to record. Baselitz's bodies are abstract, designed with irony and black humour, their sufferings absurd. Another Hero stands with his flies undone, grey spurts of semen emerging from his black trousers as he towers over a shattered landscape. His ecstatic expression suggests he is turned on by it all, while at his feet is a Disneyish duck, an emblem perhaps of the innocence he will feign in postwar life.
The art of memory is questioned in the exhibition, as the far-right AfD wins one election after another in Germany. For extremists of all hues it is not even necessary to deny the Holocaust, as one can shrug it off, trivialise it, or dismiss it as belonging to the distant past. Baselitz paints one of the Heroes waving, or saluting, in blood-soaked trousers with a ghostly shadow of a face. Around him in the European night white flecks fall slowly, like snow or ashes. The exhibition runs at Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, London, until 18 December.
