IN GERMANY, THE NEW EUROPEAN Painters have addressed themselves directly or indirectly to the problems of postwar Europe. How can the ancient structures of European society be put back into repair? What is the role of friends and family? Can short-lived amours give us a sense of our own identity? Or is the daydream a better guide? Can everyday things have something to teach us? If so, how can that something be set out in painting?
Someone who has tussled with these questions is Georg Baselitz, who was born Georg Kern in 1938 in a village called Deutschbaselitz in Saxony. After Saxony was overrun by the Russians, he stuck it out in the East until he was old enough to move to Berlin. Bent on making art, he took half the name of his birthplace, by way of a keepsake, and enrolled in the art schools of the former German capital.
National Gallery of Art
Georg Baselitz has come to be regarded as a pioneer in the renewal of figurative painting and as a founder of the so-called international neo-expressionist movement. In the late 1950s Baselitz began to develop his own style of figurative painting, challenging the orthodoxy of abstraction in the twentieth century. Baselitz produced a group of paintings from 1965 to 1966, which he called his Helden or Hero paintings, of which “Man in the Moon—Franz Pforr” is an early example.
Georg Baselitz - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georg_Baselitz
Georg Baselitz (born 23 January 1938) is a German painter. He studied in East Germany, before moving to what was then West Germany. Baselitz's style is ...
In October 1963, the work, as well as the picture Der nackte Mann, shown in the West Berlin gallery Werner & Katz, was seized by the public prosecutor's office because ofimmorality. The criminal proceedings ended in 1965 with the return of the pictures.[citation needed]
Die große Nacht im Eimer
Artist Georg Baselitz
Year 1963
Type oil on canvas
Dimensions 250 cm × 180 cm (98 in × 71 in)
Location Museum Ludwig, Cologne
MoMA | The Collection | Georg Baselitz (German, born 1938)
www.moma.org/collection/artist.php?artist_id=366
German painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. After attending grammar school in Kamenz, near Dresden, he began studying painting at the ...
http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/germany_divided.aspx
Germany divided
Baselitz and his generation
From the Duerckheim Collection
6 February – 31 August 2014
Free
Room 90 /Open late Fridays
Featuring over 90 extraordinary drawings and prints, this exhibition explores how six key post-war artists redefined art in Germany on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
All the artists in this exhibition came originally from eastern Germany and migrated to the West, the majority before the borders were sealed in 1961. Some had trained in East Germany, but it was in the West that their careers were established. As a generation, they came out of the experience of growing up in the aftermath of a Germany defeated in the Second World War, and its subsequent partition in 1949.
Much of their work is informed by the sense of collective guilt experienced by the German people over its recent past, the country’s physical and psychological destruction, and the division of the country by two opposing ideologies – the democracies of the free West and the Communist system of the Soviet bloc.
These remarkable works on paper, on public display for the first time, are on loan from the private collection of Count Christian Duerckheim. Half of them are by Georg Baselitz, with the remainder by Markus Lüpertz, Blinky Palermo, A R Penck, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter. 34 of the works in the exhibition, including 17 by Baselitz, have been generously donated to the British Museum by Count Duerckheim.
The gift includes a group of 11 drawings by Baselitz from 1960 to the late 1970s, together with prints from the same period. They cover the principal phases of his career from the Pandemonium drawings of the early 1960s, the development of his ironic ‘Heroes’ in the mid-1960s, and the subsequent fracturing of his motifs to the eventual inversion of the motif from the late 1960s.
Other works on display include Richter’s Pin-up andInstallation drawings, the characteristic Ice Age-meets-cybernetics stick-figures of Penck, as well as sculptural drawings by Lüpertz and Palermo, and a drawing and sketchbook by Polke satirising the ‘economic miracle’ of post-war reconstruction in West Germany.
The donation completely transforms the Museum’s holdings of German post-war graphic art and enables the Museum to trace the history of drawings and printmaking in Germany from the time of Dürer to the present.
Ein neuer Type('A New Type'), 1965, Georg Baselitz (b.1938), grey and yellow ochre watercolour, charcoal, graphite and white pastel on paper. Presented to the British Museum by Count Christian Duerckheim, Reproduced by permission of the artist. © Georg Baselitz PreviousNext
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Catalogue
Germany Divided: Baselitz and his generation
This title was published in January 2014 and includes 130 beautiful colour illustrations. Available in hardback with jacket.
