GEORG BASELITZ | Schwarze Säule (Black Column)

signed with the artist's initials and dated 30.VI 83; titled and dated 30.VI.83 on the reverse

Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne
Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg
Galerie Michael Werner, Cologne
Private Collection
Phillips, New York, 17 May 2018, Lot 24
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Kunsthaus Hamburg, Arbeit in Geschichte – Geschichte in Arbeit, September - November 1988, no. 4, p. 87, illustrated
Burgrieden, Museum Villa Rot, Baselitz – Ekstasen der Figur. Im Dialog mit der Kunst Afrikas, April – August 2005, illustrated
Baden-Baden, Museum Frieder Burda, Baselitz 50 Jahre Malerei, November  2009 - March 2010, p. 143, illustrated
London, Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Georg Baselitz: A Focus on the 1980s, October - November 2018

Andreas Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich 1989, p. 197, no. 167, illustrated

When I make my paintings, I begin to do things as if I were the first, the only one, as if none of these examples existed.

Georg Baselitz


Previously in the collection of the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Georg Baselitz’s Schwarze Säule (Black Column) from 1983 towers over viewers with searing immediacy. Emerging from a dense network of coarse black strokes is a looming double-headed totemic figure; the bottom half presents an upside-down head, while the top half resembles an upright face tragically shielded by two palms. The raw, tactile brushwork recalls Baselitz’s wood sculptures of the same period, which were roughly hewn from tree trunks with axe and chainsaw; while the dramatic contrast of figure and ground exemplifies a renewed rigour in Baselitz’s compositions at the beginning of the 1980s, in which a newfound expressivity of colour and immensity of form defined his artistic output. In the early years of the 1980s, Baselitz was grappling with the legacy of German Expressionism, particularly the artists of Die Brücke such as Emil Nolde and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, while simultaneously energized by the new generation of Neo-Expressionist artists that helped revive figurative painting in Europe and abroad. Created at this decisive period in his career during which he created some of his most monumental and radical paintings, Schwarze Säule (Black Column) embodies all the pathos, humor and gravitas of Baselitz’s best work.

The hallmark of Baselitz's production since 1969, figurative subjects appear upside down in an attempt to detach literal interpretation from the painted image. Seeking to free context from content without resorting to the avant-garde abstractionism of his contemporaries, Baselitz painted his subjects upside down, foregrounding colour, style and form over subject matter and illusory depth. “Painting is not a means to an end,” the artist explained; “On the contrary; painting is autonomous. And I said to myself: if this is the case, then I must take everything which has been an object of painting – landscape, the portrait and the nude, for example – and paint it upside-down. That is the best way to liberate representation from content” (the artist cited in Roy Boyne, Subject, Society and Culture, London 2001, p. 83). Elsewhere he elaborates: “If you stop fabricating motifs but still want to carry on painting, then inverting the motif is the obvious thing to do. The hierarchy which has the sky at the top and the earth at the bottom is, in any case, only a convention. We have got used to it, but we don’t have to believe in it… What I wanted was quite simply to find a way of making pictures, perhaps with a new sense of detachment” (the artist in conversation with Peter Moritz Pickshaus, in: Franz Dahlem, Georg Baselitz, Cologne 1990, p. 29).

In Schwarze Säule (Black Column) this sense of detachment is further accentuated by the uncanniness of the double-headed portrait, referencing perhaps Baselitz’s sense of isolation as a former East German who moved to the West, caught between the two opposing factions. The stark tonality in which the two heads are rendered, in tandem with the artist’s deployment of dense line, are characteristic of Baselitz’s primitively carved wooden sculptures of the same period, the first of which were produced in late 1979. The artist had previously explored the head as a subject in a painting from 1961, which was inspired by the poetry of Antoine Artaud and the drawings of a mentally ill patient, entitled G.-Kopf. In 1987 he produced an identically titled wooden sculpture, which was slashed and sliced with a vital originality and primal energy. Indeed, the very same sense of expressive crudity and fervent passion, as evidenced by the hatching, carving and crisscross lines, is traceable in the present work. Schwarze Säule (Black Column) is thus product of the artist’s earlier style, emerging from the anamorphic, deformed, distended and nightmarish bodies of his early 1960s works, as exemplified in his Pandemonium paintings and the controversial Grosse Nacht im Eimer (1963).

Signalling a point of transition in concept, subject and style, Baselitz created a brazenly irreverent pictorial schema that tore apart the historical conventions of painting. Moving from East Germany to West Berlin in 1958, Baselitz reacted against the constraints of the two contrasting artistic and political landscapes that he had traversed. Shifting from the dogma of Socialist Realism to the aesthetic hegemony of fashionable Tachism and Abstract Expressionism that dominated Western Europe at the time, Baselitz founded an entirely new visual mode of expression in order to liberate German painting from what he saw as the burden of its recent past: “When I make my paintings,” he declared, “I begin to do things as if I were the first, the only one, as if none of these examples existed” (the artist cited in Exh. Cat., Bordeaux, Musée d’Art Contemporain, Baselitz Sculptures, 1983, p. 18). In rejecting the contemporaneous inquiries of Abstract Expressionism, Conceptual art, Minimalism and Pop art, Baselitz revived a form of German Expressionism which impacted greatly upon the formation of the Neue-Wilden group in Germany during the later 1980s. With this in mind, Baselitz’s practice followed a unique expressionistic path tied to his own biography as well as a steadfast belief in the potential of figurative painting in an age that had declared it obsolete. Attested to by his representation across the most significant international public collections, it is in this vein that Baselitz remains one of the most influential painters of his generation.