Drei Streifen – Die Kuh (Three stripes – The cow)

Formerly on long term loan to the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Drei Streifen—Die Kuh is a powerful example of Georg Baselitz’s ‘Fracture’ paintings. Painted in 1968, it takes its place at a pivotal moment in his early practice, showcasing the formal innovations that would ultimately lead to the first of his iconic inverted canvases the following year. In rich, tactile strokes of impasto, Baselitz divides his canvas into three bands. In the uppermost segment, the head and body of a cow loom large against fresh, clear skies. In the lower two sections, painted deep, forest green and rich terracotta, the animal’s torso and hind legs are depicted at a ninety-degree rotation. Created between 1966 and 1969, Baselitz’s ‘Fracture’ paintings coincided with his move to the countryside. Seizing bucolic, romantic subjects—huntsmen, wild birds and domestic animals—the artist began to abstract them through division and rotation. In doing so, he posed fundamental questions about how we read images, asking at what point their symbolic associations begin to dissolve. Here, the humble cow becomes a vehicle for a complex recalibration of painting’s values, its figurative content pushed to the brink of illegibility.

Baselitz’s ‘Fracture’ paintings evolved from his seminal series of ‘Heroes’ completed between 1965 and 1966. In these works, the artist attempted to confront the scars of Germany’s recent past: his lonely, wandering vagrants drifted through barren, post-apocalyptic landscapes, searching for identity and meaning. In 1966, Baselitz and his young family moved to a large rural house in Osthofen, where the bleak, sombre palette of the ‘Heroes’ gave way to a new set of fresh, vibrant colours and prosaic, pastoral subjects. The aim of these works, however, remained unchanged: like the ‘Heroes’, the ‘Fracture’ paintings sought to visualise the search for a new artistic purpose in the wake of global conflict. The German countryside, and many of its animals, had been exploited as symbols of heroism and tradition by the Nationalist Socialist regime. By splicing and rotating their forms, Baselitz asked how much damage an image could withstand before the relationship between paint, form and meaning began to crumble. In a land fractured and divided, Baselitz proposed that the only hope for art was to rip apart its seams, and begin again: ‘to liberate representation from content’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in R. Boyne, Subject, Society and Culture, London 2001, p. 83).

This mission would ultimately culminate in Baselitz’s first upside-down paintings: a mode that would occupy him for much of his career. The present work reveals much about the processes that led him to this format. The cow stood within a long tradition of landscape painting: from the grandiloquent visions of Aelbert Cuyp and Franz Marc, to the raw ‘Art Brut’ of Jean Dubuffet. It had also, in the hands of Theo van Doesburg and Pablo Picasso, served as a motif for exploring the relationship between figuration and abstraction: a history later referenced by Roy Lichtenstein in his 1974 triptych Cow Going Abstract. If Baselitz’s ‘Fracture’ paintings reflected Germany’s ruptured post-war society, they also captured his desire to shatter art’s increasingly disparate poles. Abstraction and figuration were, according to Cold War politics, irreconcilable modes of expression. Combining influences from Italian Mannerism and German woodblock prints to Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, the present work offers a third path. Its representational content is held in perpetual tension with non-representational gesture, texture and colour. At times we see a cow, at others we see three stripes: in certain lights, we simply see paint. In the crevices between the picture’s incisions, duality and dogma dissolve, leaving a new way forwards in their wake.