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拍品专文
A poetic composition by one of the great painters and printmakers of the post-war era, Die Frau linke Seite (The Woman Left Side) (1997) captures the late Georg Baselitz’s inverted world during a period of fervent experimentation. It is part of his Wiederholugen (‘repetitions’) series, which combines human figures and floral motifs. The right half of the canvas depicts a woman, conservatively clad and wearing a white sash, floating upside down in a field of swift grey and blue-green brushstrokes. Her hat leaps from her head as if in surprise. Her forelock identifies her as Baselitz’s mother, also seen in near-contemporaneous works such as Johann tanzt und meine Mutter (1996). On the other side, Baselitz has painted two pairs of legs borrowed from a 19th-century Slovakian hinterglas (‘reverse glass’) picture of the Crucifixion. Christ’s legs dangle into the scene from both the top and bottom of the canvas. Between them is an effusive design of red and black flowers in a patch of solar yellow, providing a jolt of colour in the otherwise near-monochrome scene. Die Frau linke Seite was exhibited at Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne in 1998 alongside Die Frau rechte Seite (The Woman Right Side), which depicts the same scene horizontally flipped.
Baselitz grew up in post-World War II East Germany, surrounded by the ruins and desolation of a defeated nation. His home village Deutschbaselitz—from which he took his artistic nom de plume—sat next to Wendischbaselitz, a settlement inhabited by the Slavic Sorbian ethnic group who had been persecuted under National Socialism. From the late 1950s he developed a practice that drew on objects and images from German culture to see if it was possible to paint them as solely objective pictures. From 1969 he composed most of his works upside down, in an attempt to further distance them from representation. Die Frau linke Seite sees Baselitz take this process further still, with the flowers and upper pair of legs occupying a different alignment to the central figure. The work belongs to a period in which Baselitz engaged with the aesthetics of German and Slavic folk art, including Bohemian silk embroidery, Sorbian costume and hinterglas. This last technique, which had flourished in Central Europe since the medieval era, involved applying pigment to a glass surface before turning around the pane so that the image was viewed from the other side. In the early twentieth century it had inspired the polychromatic, vibrantly coloured works of Der Blaue Reiter artists Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Baselitz evokes this tradition in his own unique visual language. Die Frau linke Seite appears to glow from within, with the luminescence of painted glass.
Die Frau linke Seite dates from a significant transitional period in Baselitz’s practice. ‘In the last decade of the twentieth century’, observes Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, ‘both the form and content of Georg Baselitz’s pictorial world became lighter and airier in a development that was without doubt influenced by the changed political situation in Germany, notably the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification’ (‘Recollection, Experimentation, and Renewal as a Driving Force’, in Baselitz, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2018, p. 180). Baselitz began to capture the concept of heimat (‘home’), defined as the opposite of feeling alienated from a place or milieu. In 1996 he embarked on a monumental series of paintings based on old photographs of his family members. As a consequence he began to engage more closely with the cultural heritage of his native Saxony, which he had left in 1958 to pursue his studies in the West. As well as folk art, this shift saw him embrace the work of the great German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich. Lighter, decorative motifs such as flowers began to proliferate in place of the weighty subject matter of earlier years.
This same period saw a change in Baselitz’s technique. In 1991 he had begun to paint on the floor, adding an element of spontaneity to his practice. ‘If you paint on the floor,’ he explained, ‘the conditions are completely different. You can’t step back, close one eye, and squint the way painters do when appraising their picture and such’ (quoted in R. Calvocoressi, Georg Baselitz, London, 2021, p. 238). Five years later he stopped working in thick strokes of oil and instead thinned his paint, allowing him to spread it swiftly across the canvas. ‘Oils applied in this manner resemble watercolours,’ writes Richard Shiff. ‘Their luminosity results in part from the transparency of the paint layers, which allow the canvas, primed with white, to reflect a maximum of light’ ( ‘A Family of Relations’, in Georg Baselitz: Recent Paintings, exh. cat., Pace Wildenstein, New York, 1997, p. 9). Die Frau linke Seite is a scintillating example of this new, freer, diaphanous turn in Baselitz’s career.
Baselitz grew up in post-World War II East Germany, surrounded by the ruins and desolation of a defeated nation. His home village Deutschbaselitz—from which he took his artistic nom de plume—sat next to Wendischbaselitz, a settlement inhabited by the Slavic Sorbian ethnic group who had been persecuted under National Socialism. From the late 1950s he developed a practice that drew on objects and images from German culture to see if it was possible to paint them as solely objective pictures. From 1969 he composed most of his works upside down, in an attempt to further distance them from representation. Die Frau linke Seite sees Baselitz take this process further still, with the flowers and upper pair of legs occupying a different alignment to the central figure. The work belongs to a period in which Baselitz engaged with the aesthetics of German and Slavic folk art, including Bohemian silk embroidery, Sorbian costume and hinterglas. This last technique, which had flourished in Central Europe since the medieval era, involved applying pigment to a glass surface before turning around the pane so that the image was viewed from the other side. In the early twentieth century it had inspired the polychromatic, vibrantly coloured works of Der Blaue Reiter artists Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. Baselitz evokes this tradition in his own unique visual language. Die Frau linke Seite appears to glow from within, with the luminescence of painted glass.
Die Frau linke Seite dates from a significant transitional period in Baselitz’s practice. ‘In the last decade of the twentieth century’, observes Carla Schulz-Hoffmann, ‘both the form and content of Georg Baselitz’s pictorial world became lighter and airier in a development that was without doubt influenced by the changed political situation in Germany, notably the fall of the Berlin Wall and the German reunification’ (‘Recollection, Experimentation, and Renewal as a Driving Force’, in Baselitz, exh. cat., Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, 2018, p. 180). Baselitz began to capture the concept of heimat (‘home’), defined as the opposite of feeling alienated from a place or milieu. In 1996 he embarked on a monumental series of paintings based on old photographs of his family members. As a consequence he began to engage more closely with the cultural heritage of his native Saxony, which he had left in 1958 to pursue his studies in the West. As well as folk art, this shift saw him embrace the work of the great German Romantic Caspar David Friedrich. Lighter, decorative motifs such as flowers began to proliferate in place of the weighty subject matter of earlier years.
This same period saw a change in Baselitz’s technique. In 1991 he had begun to paint on the floor, adding an element of spontaneity to his practice. ‘If you paint on the floor,’ he explained, ‘the conditions are completely different. You can’t step back, close one eye, and squint the way painters do when appraising their picture and such’ (quoted in R. Calvocoressi, Georg Baselitz, London, 2021, p. 238). Five years later he stopped working in thick strokes of oil and instead thinned his paint, allowing him to spread it swiftly across the canvas. ‘Oils applied in this manner resemble watercolours,’ writes Richard Shiff. ‘Their luminosity results in part from the transparency of the paint layers, which allow the canvas, primed with white, to reflect a maximum of light’ ( ‘A Family of Relations’, in Georg Baselitz: Recent Paintings, exh. cat., Pace Wildenstein, New York, 1997, p. 9). Die Frau linke Seite is a scintillating example of this new, freer, diaphanous turn in Baselitz’s career.