Georg Baselitz

Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 2010

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is brighter and the background tends more towards a true white in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Extremely close inspection reveals a few extremely short and thin stable hairline cracks in the pink pigment towards the centre of the composition. All other surface irregularities appear to be inherent to the artist's working process. No restoration is apparent when examined under ultraviolet light.
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With its ambitious scale and eloquent brushwork, Es war einmal und zurück must be read in light of the context of Baselitz’s entire illustrious practice. The upright figure with broad shoulders emulates Baselitz most celebrated body of the work – the Hero paintings from the 1960s – while the vibrant colour palette and neo-expressionist energy recalls the artist’s more recent artistic behaviour.

Born in Deutschbaselitz – which inspired his change of last name – in what would later be part of East Germany, Baselitz first studied art whilst in the austere communist regime of East Berlin before being expelled after one term for ‘socio-political immaturity’. Seven years later, in 1965, he earned a scholarship to study for six months at the Villa Romana in Florence. Being in the topographical epicentre of the Renaissance allowed him to get acquainted more than ever before not only to traditional art historical modes of representation but also to mannerism and its exaggeration of corporeal features, far away from the strict socialist realism he witnessed at the dawn of his artistic education. This experience at the Villa Romana proved to be fundamental in Baselitz’s life, as he later returned to set up a second studio in Florence – aside from his studio in Derneburg – in 1976. Characteristically, after the huge critical success of the upright Hero paintings, Baselitz’s pictures since 1969 represent upside-down subjects.

Although formally comparable to the upside-down paintings, in which an almost violent treatment given to an uneasily recognisable subject, the present lot is however very different in ambition. Its title itself hints at this nostalgic return. Literally meaning Once Upon a Time and Back in German, Es war einmal und zurück draws a conclusion with the artist’s mid-career works by reinvestigating his celebrated early upright paintings, in which exaggeratedly proportioned muscles were a fundamental feature to convey the overrunning life-force of the rebellious hero, standing amongst mythical ruins. The feeling of déjà vu experienced when looking at the present work demonstrates how Baselitz’s iconic Hero paintings became readymade images deeply imprinted in our collective memory.