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Lot Essay
Executed in 2000, Davos 1954 is a serene, yet powerful painting by Georg Baselitz. Almost bordering abstraction in its visual language, Davos 1954 contains gestures that have come to characterise and be identified with the Expressionist impulses of German artists emerging within the post-War period. In contrast to Baselitz's other works, which reflect an intense and crudely expressive painterly style, Davos 1954 impresses through its warm and soft colour palette. From the blue and white mountain slopes, subtly conveyed through the calligraphic black strokes of a thick brush, to the frenzied dots and lines which formulate the small roofs of chalets and winter homes, Davos 1954 depicts an idealised Swiss village tucked away in the deep snow of the Alps. A blossoming tree remains in the foreground in juxtaposition to the frozen landscape, alluding perhaps to the inevitable change of seasons. Yet, in this seemingly peaceful and still landscape, there is something unsettling, almost bizarre, Baselitz has once again employed his recognisable technique of turning an image on its side. He has created an overturned landscape, a gesture which not only challenges preconceived notions of perception, but illuminates what Baselitz has endeavored to do with his paintings, and that is to 'liberate representation from content' (G. Baselitz quoted in D. Waldman ed., Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1995, p. 71).
The enigmatic void in the centre of the canvas, a reoccurring motif in Baselitz's recent paintings, at once captures the onlooker's eye. Its circular existence subverts any notion of representation as a holistic or complete vision, a concept prevalent throughout Baselitz's practice, from his Fracture paintings of the 1960s to his more recent Remix paintings of the early 2000s. Revealing an insight in the posthumous legacy of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Davos 1954 not only celebrates Kirchner as a masterful painter, but also acknowledges the succession of his extensive oeuvre to those individuals who managed it after the artist's death. As seen along the lower edge of the painting, the canvas appears inscribed with the numbers '54', the year in which Kirchner's body of work transferred from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel into the private hands of art dealer, Norbert Ketterer.
As exemplified through Davos 1954 and other works from his extensive artistic career, Baselitz demonstrates that despite history's perpetual motion forward and the distance created between the 'past' and the 'now', "what no one can escape, what [he] could never escape, was Germany and being German" (G. Baselitz quoted in Baselitz, exh. cat., The Royal Academy of Arts, London 2007, p. 11).
The enigmatic void in the centre of the canvas, a reoccurring motif in Baselitz's recent paintings, at once captures the onlooker's eye. Its circular existence subverts any notion of representation as a holistic or complete vision, a concept prevalent throughout Baselitz's practice, from his Fracture paintings of the 1960s to his more recent Remix paintings of the early 2000s. Revealing an insight in the posthumous legacy of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Davos 1954 not only celebrates Kirchner as a masterful painter, but also acknowledges the succession of his extensive oeuvre to those individuals who managed it after the artist's death. As seen along the lower edge of the painting, the canvas appears inscribed with the numbers '54', the year in which Kirchner's body of work transferred from the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel into the private hands of art dealer, Norbert Ketterer.
As exemplified through Davos 1954 and other works from his extensive artistic career, Baselitz demonstrates that despite history's perpetual motion forward and the distance created between the 'past' and the 'now', "what no one can escape, what [he] could never escape, was Germany and being German" (G. Baselitz quoted in Baselitz, exh. cat., The Royal Academy of Arts, London 2007, p. 11).