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Lot Essay
‘Some of the passages in [Baselitz’s] new, predominantly black and white paintings are explosively lyrical in their bursts of petals, flutter of wings and erupting colors of blood and flesh; but these paintings also contain terrifying pockets in which everything pours and seeps into everything else and borders do not exist. The terror, like the bloom, is irrepressible and irresistible.’
–Michael Brenson
‘Painting is not a means to an end. 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.’
–Georg Baselitz
Dazzling strokes of bright white paint radiate against a vast black backdrop in Georg Baselitz’s 1990-91 painting, Schneespitzen (Snow Peaks). Depicting an inverted human figure, the work comes from Baselitz’s iconic body of ‘upside-down’ works. Started in 1989, these paintings sought to tip the scales of style and subject matter, reversing the emphasis onto the former by – quite literally – reversing the imagery of the latter. As Baselitz has explained of his distinctive technique, ‘Painting is not a means to an end. 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’ (G. Baselitz quoted in R. Boyne, Subject, Society and Culture, London 2001, p. 83). Rapidly executed, the brushy white paintwork seems intuitively applied: infused with hues of milky purple, each mark, smudge and movement is clearly visible on the dark surface beneath. The effect of white on black is striking; it awakens a visceral, even primal, response in the viewer that goes beyond the confines of representation and into the realms of raw sensation.
The composition, standing almost ten feet tall, is dominated by the upturned figure, over which Baselitz has added sweeping licks of paint. Depicted thus, the figurative and the abstract appear to permeate one another, blurring the boundaries until any sense of subject or meaning dissolves. Indeed, as the title suggests, the inverted portrait seems to melt into a visage of snow-capped mountain tops, glistening in the sunlight. Born in Germany in 1938, Baselitz’s most formative years were spent under a time of great political upheaval, which was to deeply impact his artistic career. His capsized motifs express a desire to subvert the harsh severity of the Nazi regime, and later still the rigid regulations of Soviet-controlled East Berlin, where he briefly studied art in 1956 before being expelled for so-termed ‘socio-political immaturity’ (https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/ art-artists/name/georg-baselitz-hon-ra [accessed 9th January 2018]). Pointedly rejecting everything from the enforced classicism of the Nazi era to East Berlin’s Soviet-inspired socialist realism, and even West Berlin’s propensity for purely abstract art, Baselitz looked instead to a new pictorial language, in a bid to forge a fresh identity for German painting in a post-war world. Painted shortly after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, Schneespitzen might be read as a visual embodiment of the liberation of collapse. Bridging elements of the human form and nature, abstraction and representation, its metamorphic essence transcends notions of context, space and time. In Baselitz’s painted world, as Michael Brenson writes, ‘everything pours and seeps into everything else and borders do not exist’ (M. Brenson, Georg Baselitz Recent Paintings: essay by Michael Brenson, exh. cat., The Pace Gallery, New York, 1992, p. 9).
–Michael Brenson
‘Painting is not a means to an end. 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.’
–Georg Baselitz
Dazzling strokes of bright white paint radiate against a vast black backdrop in Georg Baselitz’s 1990-91 painting, Schneespitzen (Snow Peaks). Depicting an inverted human figure, the work comes from Baselitz’s iconic body of ‘upside-down’ works. Started in 1989, these paintings sought to tip the scales of style and subject matter, reversing the emphasis onto the former by – quite literally – reversing the imagery of the latter. As Baselitz has explained of his distinctive technique, ‘Painting is not a means to an end. 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’ (G. Baselitz quoted in R. Boyne, Subject, Society and Culture, London 2001, p. 83). Rapidly executed, the brushy white paintwork seems intuitively applied: infused with hues of milky purple, each mark, smudge and movement is clearly visible on the dark surface beneath. The effect of white on black is striking; it awakens a visceral, even primal, response in the viewer that goes beyond the confines of representation and into the realms of raw sensation.
The composition, standing almost ten feet tall, is dominated by the upturned figure, over which Baselitz has added sweeping licks of paint. Depicted thus, the figurative and the abstract appear to permeate one another, blurring the boundaries until any sense of subject or meaning dissolves. Indeed, as the title suggests, the inverted portrait seems to melt into a visage of snow-capped mountain tops, glistening in the sunlight. Born in Germany in 1938, Baselitz’s most formative years were spent under a time of great political upheaval, which was to deeply impact his artistic career. His capsized motifs express a desire to subvert the harsh severity of the Nazi regime, and later still the rigid regulations of Soviet-controlled East Berlin, where he briefly studied art in 1956 before being expelled for so-termed ‘socio-political immaturity’ (https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/ art-artists/name/georg-baselitz-hon-ra [accessed 9th January 2018]). Pointedly rejecting everything from the enforced classicism of the Nazi era to East Berlin’s Soviet-inspired socialist realism, and even West Berlin’s propensity for purely abstract art, Baselitz looked instead to a new pictorial language, in a bid to forge a fresh identity for German painting in a post-war world. Painted shortly after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall, Schneespitzen might be read as a visual embodiment of the liberation of collapse. Bridging elements of the human form and nature, abstraction and representation, its metamorphic essence transcends notions of context, space and time. In Baselitz’s painted world, as Michael Brenson writes, ‘everything pours and seeps into everything else and borders do not exist’ (M. Brenson, Georg Baselitz Recent Paintings: essay by Michael Brenson, exh. cat., The Pace Gallery, New York, 1992, p. 9).