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Lot Essay
‘It is these dogs that set the precedent of climbing up the pictorial surface, emancipated from the laws of gravity, in a way that heralds the transition to Baselitz’s later practice of inverting his motifs’ (A. Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich 1989, p. 92).
‘Setting out in earnest to go to extremes in violating conventional principles of pictorial construction... ‘The Fracture Paintings’ mark a further stage in Baselitz’s strategy of placing increased emphasis on the formal and painterly aspects of his work’ (A. Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich 1989, p. 91).
‘What lies in front of me on the canvas exists somewhere [already] behind the canvas or under the floor, and needs only to be captured, that it needs to be drawn and made visible... I’m a German artist and what I do is rooted in the German tradition’ (G. Baselitz, in R. Shiff, ‘Georg Baselitz Grounded,’ in Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 2002, p. 49, note 33).
Exuding life and energy from his impulsive brushstrokes, Georg Baselitz’s Ein zerrissener Hund, aufwärts, 1968, presents the noble hunting dog, fractured and divided. Painted at a pivotal moment in Baselitz’s practice, Ein zerrissener Hund, aufwärts forms part of the seminal Fracture Paintings which represent the keystone between his early Hero paintings of the early 1960s, and his fully inverted canvases of the following year. Subverting the traditional German archetype of the hunting dog, Baselitz first explored this motif in 1967, with the charcoal work Hundund Hase abwärts. By the following year, Baselitz had radically transformed the motif, moving from transparent washes to creamy impastos, and most dramatically, fracturing the composition. At once highly structured and abstracted, Ein zerrissener Hund, aufwärts was painted at a staggering 90-degree angle, allowing the artist to directly engage with the medium of paint itself. Dividing the composition into thirds, the diagonal fissures in the top right and bottom left hand corners, where the dog’s tail is allowed to be completed, marks this out as a very rare composition with Baselitz’s practice.
The Fractured Paintings were a radical way of engaging with the surface and texture of paint while challenging the legibility of a figurative image. Through dissection and juxtaposition, Baselitz introduces a striking formal discontinuity from the initial thematic idea, allowing the work to move toward defining an overall abstracted effect. This fractured aesthetic was a painting strategy Baselitz developed in 1966, ‘set[ting] out in earnest to go to extremes in violating conventional principles of pictorial construction... ‘The Fracture Paintings’ mark a further stage in Baselitz’s strategy of placing increased emphasis on the formal and painterly aspects of his work’ (A. Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich 1989, p. 91). The result is a painting with a commanding presence; with vivid colouration, distorted figuration, strident contours and a pitting of unschooled representational strategies against traditional painting techniques.
In Ein zerrissener Hund, aufwärts, rather than merely turning the canvas, Baselitz has painstakingly painted at a 90-degree angle. This method allowed Baselitz to distance himself from the figurative motif, allowing the tactile painted surface to become his primary concern. Dividing the canvas into diagonal sections, Baselitz crafts distinct vignettes with varying orientation and subtle differentiations of colour palettes. Refracting a spectrum of copper, ochre, green, and sky blue, the canvas is fractured by slices of bright white cutting jaggedly through the composition. Through the artist’s particular compositional and textural virtuosity, each segment of the canvas maintains a sense of formal autonomy. In places, the white fracturing is the primed canvas itself; in others he has painted white lines, constantly re-working the composition. Marked out from the earthy palette of the paintings created in prior years, which are dominated by greens and browns, the present work sings with its fresh bright blue and the crisp white of the primed canvas.
The hunting dog in particular was to be a critical motif in Baselitz’s move towards fully inverting his compositions in 1969. Indeed, Franzke identifies, ‘It is these dogs that set the precedent of climbing up the pictorial surface, emancipated from the laws of gravity, in a way that heralds the transition to Baselitz’s later practice of inverting his motifs’ (A. Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich 1989, p. 92). In 1969, Baselitz fully engaged with the critical potential of turning an entire composition upside down as shown in the woodland scene Der Wald auf dem Kopf.
Responding to and embracing the artist’s German history, the present work is a bold example of the way in which Baselitz engaged with his nation’s troubled past by merging two powerful Germanic themes: natural history and the forest. In this way, the forest becomes the site of game animals and principally hunting dogs, flanked by immense tree-trunks. The forest depicted in the present work also takes on a biographic quality for it was in 1972 that Baselitz relocated to a new studio in Musbach on the edge of the Black Forest. As numerous scholars have observed, the forest is of particular national significance in Germany: ‘not in any modern nation in the world has the spirit of identification with the forest [Waldgefühl] remained so vital’ (E. Canetti, quoted in N. Rosenthal (ed.), Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2007, p. 121). By rotating the mystical woodland scene, Baselitz furnishes the viewer with an entirely unconventional way of seeing, an ontological shift in both his process of painting and our way of seeing. ‘I was born into a destroyed order and I didn’t want to re-establish an order’ (G. Baselitz, interviewed by D. Kuspit, in ‘Goth to Dance,’ in Artforum 33, Summer 1995, p. 76).
Through segmentation, radical cropping and disjunction, Baselitz subverted the traditional Romanticism associated with the landscape genre. In so doing, Baselitz created a statement of pictorial dynamism and expressivity, a turbulence that troubles representation even as it compels viewing. Enshrining the Germanic bucolic tradition with a new painting quality, he produces a work of moving allegorical resonance, deeply compelling, immediate, and eloquent: ‘[what lies in front of me on the canvas] exists somewhere [already] behind the canvas or under the floor, and needs only to be captured, that it needs to be drawn and made visible... I’m a German artist and what I do is rooted in the German tradition’ (G. Baselitz, in R. Shiff, ‘Georg Baselitz Grounded,’ Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 28, no. 1, 2002, p. 49, note 33). Considered in this light, Ein zerrissener Hund, aufwärts is positioned in an interesting trajectory whereby the fractured landscape not only encourages a fresh engagement with painting but also subverts the forest’s symbolic power as signifier for the nation.
‘Setting out in earnest to go to extremes in violating conventional principles of pictorial construction... ‘The Fracture Paintings’ mark a further stage in Baselitz’s strategy of placing increased emphasis on the formal and painterly aspects of his work’ (A. Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich 1989, p. 91).
‘What lies in front of me on the canvas exists somewhere [already] behind the canvas or under the floor, and needs only to be captured, that it needs to be drawn and made visible... I’m a German artist and what I do is rooted in the German tradition’ (G. Baselitz, in R. Shiff, ‘Georg Baselitz Grounded,’ in Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 2002, p. 49, note 33).
Exuding life and energy from his impulsive brushstrokes, Georg Baselitz’s Ein zerrissener Hund, aufwärts, 1968, presents the noble hunting dog, fractured and divided. Painted at a pivotal moment in Baselitz’s practice, Ein zerrissener Hund, aufwärts forms part of the seminal Fracture Paintings which represent the keystone between his early Hero paintings of the early 1960s, and his fully inverted canvases of the following year. Subverting the traditional German archetype of the hunting dog, Baselitz first explored this motif in 1967, with the charcoal work Hundund Hase abwärts. By the following year, Baselitz had radically transformed the motif, moving from transparent washes to creamy impastos, and most dramatically, fracturing the composition. At once highly structured and abstracted, Ein zerrissener Hund, aufwärts was painted at a staggering 90-degree angle, allowing the artist to directly engage with the medium of paint itself. Dividing the composition into thirds, the diagonal fissures in the top right and bottom left hand corners, where the dog’s tail is allowed to be completed, marks this out as a very rare composition with Baselitz’s practice.
The Fractured Paintings were a radical way of engaging with the surface and texture of paint while challenging the legibility of a figurative image. Through dissection and juxtaposition, Baselitz introduces a striking formal discontinuity from the initial thematic idea, allowing the work to move toward defining an overall abstracted effect. This fractured aesthetic was a painting strategy Baselitz developed in 1966, ‘set[ting] out in earnest to go to extremes in violating conventional principles of pictorial construction... ‘The Fracture Paintings’ mark a further stage in Baselitz’s strategy of placing increased emphasis on the formal and painterly aspects of his work’ (A. Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich 1989, p. 91). The result is a painting with a commanding presence; with vivid colouration, distorted figuration, strident contours and a pitting of unschooled representational strategies against traditional painting techniques.
In Ein zerrissener Hund, aufwärts, rather than merely turning the canvas, Baselitz has painstakingly painted at a 90-degree angle. This method allowed Baselitz to distance himself from the figurative motif, allowing the tactile painted surface to become his primary concern. Dividing the canvas into diagonal sections, Baselitz crafts distinct vignettes with varying orientation and subtle differentiations of colour palettes. Refracting a spectrum of copper, ochre, green, and sky blue, the canvas is fractured by slices of bright white cutting jaggedly through the composition. Through the artist’s particular compositional and textural virtuosity, each segment of the canvas maintains a sense of formal autonomy. In places, the white fracturing is the primed canvas itself; in others he has painted white lines, constantly re-working the composition. Marked out from the earthy palette of the paintings created in prior years, which are dominated by greens and browns, the present work sings with its fresh bright blue and the crisp white of the primed canvas.
The hunting dog in particular was to be a critical motif in Baselitz’s move towards fully inverting his compositions in 1969. Indeed, Franzke identifies, ‘It is these dogs that set the precedent of climbing up the pictorial surface, emancipated from the laws of gravity, in a way that heralds the transition to Baselitz’s later practice of inverting his motifs’ (A. Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich 1989, p. 92). In 1969, Baselitz fully engaged with the critical potential of turning an entire composition upside down as shown in the woodland scene Der Wald auf dem Kopf.
Responding to and embracing the artist’s German history, the present work is a bold example of the way in which Baselitz engaged with his nation’s troubled past by merging two powerful Germanic themes: natural history and the forest. In this way, the forest becomes the site of game animals and principally hunting dogs, flanked by immense tree-trunks. The forest depicted in the present work also takes on a biographic quality for it was in 1972 that Baselitz relocated to a new studio in Musbach on the edge of the Black Forest. As numerous scholars have observed, the forest is of particular national significance in Germany: ‘not in any modern nation in the world has the spirit of identification with the forest [Waldgefühl] remained so vital’ (E. Canetti, quoted in N. Rosenthal (ed.), Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2007, p. 121). By rotating the mystical woodland scene, Baselitz furnishes the viewer with an entirely unconventional way of seeing, an ontological shift in both his process of painting and our way of seeing. ‘I was born into a destroyed order and I didn’t want to re-establish an order’ (G. Baselitz, interviewed by D. Kuspit, in ‘Goth to Dance,’ in Artforum 33, Summer 1995, p. 76).
Through segmentation, radical cropping and disjunction, Baselitz subverted the traditional Romanticism associated with the landscape genre. In so doing, Baselitz created a statement of pictorial dynamism and expressivity, a turbulence that troubles representation even as it compels viewing. Enshrining the Germanic bucolic tradition with a new painting quality, he produces a work of moving allegorical resonance, deeply compelling, immediate, and eloquent: ‘[what lies in front of me on the canvas] exists somewhere [already] behind the canvas or under the floor, and needs only to be captured, that it needs to be drawn and made visible... I’m a German artist and what I do is rooted in the German tradition’ (G. Baselitz, in R. Shiff, ‘Georg Baselitz Grounded,’ Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 28, no. 1, 2002, p. 49, note 33). Considered in this light, Ein zerrissener Hund, aufwärts is positioned in an interesting trajectory whereby the fractured landscape not only encourages a fresh engagement with painting but also subverts the forest’s symbolic power as signifier for the nation.