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Lot Essay
‘I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed nation, a destroyed society. And I didn’t want to reestablish an order: I’d seen enough of so-called order’ - Georg Baselitz
Executed in 1966, Georg Baselitz’s drawing Vier Streifen, Die Kuh (Four Stripes, The Cow) offers a graphic rendition of a cow composed over four conjoined sheets of paper. Each strip has been rendered in alternating strokes of ink and pencil, creating a dynamic and fragmentary image at once reminiscent of Picasso’s Cubist planes and the pastoral landscape paintings of Constable and Turner, yet simultaneously indicative of an entirely new pictorial syntax. The drawing belongs to the artist’s body of ‘Fracture’ works, developed between 1966 and 1969, which playfully sought to disrupt narrative structure and subject matter by splicing and distorting the represented image. ‘I don’t like pictures that tell stories,’ he once declared (G. Baselitz, quoted in B. Barker, Georg Baselitz: Paintings, 1962-1988, exh. cat., London, Grob Gallery, 1990, p. 8). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Baselitz did not turn to modern materials or pure abstraction but rather strove to reimagine painterly traditions for a fractured post-war world, still scarred from the traumas of the recent past. Vier Streifen, Die Kuh was included in the artist’s solo exhibition in 1970 at the Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp: a distinguished institution which showcased works by leading European and American artists until its closure in 1976. The work was subsequently acquired by the eminent Dutch furniture designer, art collector and curator Martin Visser, and has remained in his collection ever since.
Through blurring and blending medium, graphic technique and imagery, Vier Streifen, Die Kuh presents the viewer with an array of discontinuous perspectives: a cow’s head composed in calligraphic ink brusquely switches into the frontal depiction of a cow’s muzzle and upper torso in softer pencil tones; a diving bird emerges mid-flight from a haze of inky scrawls and flecks, before abruptly morphing into a depiction of the cow’s hooves and a pair of boots, abandoned in a grassy meadow. In the year this work was produced, Baselitz left West Berlin, where he had lived since 1957, for the Rhineland countryside. Something of a homecoming, this transition to a rural environment had a profound impact on the artist, whose works from this period frequently explore pastoral themes. Cut cleanly into four horizontal strips, each paper segment in this drawing has been slightly misaligned to create an overall vision that does not quite register yet nonetheless conveys a raw and essential vitality. This shift between pictorial clarity and incoherence exemplifies Baselitz’s search for a means of representation liberated from the constrains of content and context, which was to culminate in his signature ‘upside-down’ paintings initiated in 1969. In embracing a new pictorial language whilst acknowledging the burdens of the past, Vier Streifen, Die Kuh epitomises the central concerns of one of Germany’s most provocative post-war artists.
Executed in 1966, Georg Baselitz’s drawing Vier Streifen, Die Kuh (Four Stripes, The Cow) offers a graphic rendition of a cow composed over four conjoined sheets of paper. Each strip has been rendered in alternating strokes of ink and pencil, creating a dynamic and fragmentary image at once reminiscent of Picasso’s Cubist planes and the pastoral landscape paintings of Constable and Turner, yet simultaneously indicative of an entirely new pictorial syntax. The drawing belongs to the artist’s body of ‘Fracture’ works, developed between 1966 and 1969, which playfully sought to disrupt narrative structure and subject matter by splicing and distorting the represented image. ‘I don’t like pictures that tell stories,’ he once declared (G. Baselitz, quoted in B. Barker, Georg Baselitz: Paintings, 1962-1988, exh. cat., London, Grob Gallery, 1990, p. 8). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Baselitz did not turn to modern materials or pure abstraction but rather strove to reimagine painterly traditions for a fractured post-war world, still scarred from the traumas of the recent past. Vier Streifen, Die Kuh was included in the artist’s solo exhibition in 1970 at the Wide White Space Gallery, Antwerp: a distinguished institution which showcased works by leading European and American artists until its closure in 1976. The work was subsequently acquired by the eminent Dutch furniture designer, art collector and curator Martin Visser, and has remained in his collection ever since.
Through blurring and blending medium, graphic technique and imagery, Vier Streifen, Die Kuh presents the viewer with an array of discontinuous perspectives: a cow’s head composed in calligraphic ink brusquely switches into the frontal depiction of a cow’s muzzle and upper torso in softer pencil tones; a diving bird emerges mid-flight from a haze of inky scrawls and flecks, before abruptly morphing into a depiction of the cow’s hooves and a pair of boots, abandoned in a grassy meadow. In the year this work was produced, Baselitz left West Berlin, where he had lived since 1957, for the Rhineland countryside. Something of a homecoming, this transition to a rural environment had a profound impact on the artist, whose works from this period frequently explore pastoral themes. Cut cleanly into four horizontal strips, each paper segment in this drawing has been slightly misaligned to create an overall vision that does not quite register yet nonetheless conveys a raw and essential vitality. This shift between pictorial clarity and incoherence exemplifies Baselitz’s search for a means of representation liberated from the constrains of content and context, which was to culminate in his signature ‘upside-down’ paintings initiated in 1969. In embracing a new pictorial language whilst acknowledging the burdens of the past, Vier Streifen, Die Kuh epitomises the central concerns of one of Germany’s most provocative post-war artists.