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Lot Essay
‘I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I didn’t want to re-establish an order: I’d seen enough of so-called order’
GEORG BASELITZ
‘I work with fragments. I love fragmentary things’
GEORG BASELITZ
Die Schwalbe (The Swallow) (1967) is an important early painting by Georg Baselitz, fusing elements of several of his groundbreaking series of the 1960s. Against an abstract background of sunlit green, a dramatically foreshortened semi-nude figure leans forward, face sternly stoic, arms out in the posture of flight. Painted in thick, expressive daubs, his ruddy, rough-hewn form undercuts any idea of takeoff. One foot rests on a thick branch, outlined in dark brown strokes below. His head hovers just above his neck; the left hand is likewise severed at the wrist, and the right at the elbow, dripping blood (or is it just paint?) into the air. This radical motif of fragmentation is typical of Baselitz’s ‘Fracture’ paintings of 1964-68, while the subject’s monumental, ramshackle physique relates him to the ‘Heroes’ of 1965-66: both series whose formal devices express the scarred, ruptured nature of the Germany Baselitz knew. Later, beginning with Der Wald auf dem Kopf (‘The Wood on its Head’) (1969), he would take the fracturing of the picture plane one step further, inverting it totally to ‘empty’ it of referential content. Although Baselitz often rejected the idea that his paintings had any subject matter at all, their biographical overtones are clear. With his defiant aesthetic of opposition and excess, he aimed to liberate painting from the shackles of narrative and symbolism and to dethrone its idols, partly in reaction to the art of the repressive National Socialist and Communist regimes that he had lived through. In 1995, he reflected that he ‘was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I didn’t want to re-establish an order: I’d seen enough of so-called order’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in ‘Goth to Dance: Georg Baselitz in conversation with Donald Kuspit’, Artforum, vol. XXXIII, no. 10, Summer 1995, p. 78). Die Schwalbe embodies this attitude with impressive bravura.
The year before he painted Die Schwalbe, Baselitz moved to the Rhineland countryside with his wife, having lived in West Berlin since 1957. This shift to a rural environment was something of a homecoming: born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938, Baselitz had grown up in (and took his name from) the small village of Deutschbaselitz in Saxony, East Germany. The Sorbian folklore of his youth seems to have found its way back into works like Die Schwalbe, their rustic palette and fairytale quality perhaps heightened by his recent return to field and forest. ‘There were no air spirits,’ the artist recalled of his childhood’s mythology; ‘just mostly earth spirits that lived in the woods, just above ground, that is. Everything threatening and everything benevolent came out of the ground. Nothing from the heavens. Except for aeroplanes, of course, towards the end of the war’ (G. Baselitz in conversation with H. P. Schwerfel, 1988, in D. Gretenkort (ed.), Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, London 2010, p. 148). Die Schwalbe was in fact the German nickname for the Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter plane, which played an important and brutal role in the Second World War. The title also makes ironic reference to the swallow as a natural symbol of hope, spring and renewal: Baselitz’s heavy, broken figure flatly denies art its transcendent prerogatives. There is nothing airborne about this gleefully earthy painting. The figure’s extreme foreshortening, along with the detail of a discreet loincloth, makes a mockery of the divine bodies who gaze down from the graceful clouds of Renaissance ceilings. Die Schwalbe is an image of fantasy and folly, mauling the established ideals of painting; it is also an icon of the new liberty Baselitz found in attacking convention in its every form, while paradoxically rooted in a disrupted, distinctly Germanic tradition.
‘I maintain that I’m not an Expressionist,’ Baselitz said in 1987, ‘because their methods involved making illustrative paintings, commentaries on how to change society and the world around us. I don’t have anything to do with all that. If I paint a cow green then at most this is a mistake, or the cow really is wearing green’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in M. Hanstein and L. Schmidt-Mühlisch, ‘The Picture Behind the Canvas is Not a Utopia’, Die Welt, No. 267, 16 November 1987, p. 9). This is a typically tricky assertion from a painter who strove for his medium’s total autonomy from the rest of the world. There are obvious links between Baselitz’s technique and the ‘expressive’, disharmonic and asymmetrical qualities of much German art, from Dürer and Cranach through to the extreme emotion and primitivist nature-cult of Die Brücke. Furthermore, while his paintings may not be ‘illustrative’ or ‘commentaries’, they inevitably sit within the particular social and political contexts that Baselitz railed against. After Die Schwalbe, he would return to the theme of flight with the Adler or ‘Eagles’ of the 1970s and 1980s. In these upside-down works he shot down the king of the birds, inverting and neutralising one of the most loaded symbols of German cultural heritage. This was Baselitz’s image of a ruined and misguided country, an aggressive antithesis to emblems of imperial might. Plunged to earth, the magnificent is made absurd. Taking earth as its starting point, Die Schwalbe instead pictures man failing to fly, and the foolishness of aspiring to magnificence in the first place. Fragmented, wounded and weighed down with history, Baselitz tackles the situation with anticlimactic humour and bold, renegade energy. Die Schwalbe at once embraces bathos, reimagines painting and acknowledges the trauma of a century, bringing together the central concerns of one of Germany’s greatest and most provocative postwar artists.
GEORG BASELITZ
‘I work with fragments. I love fragmentary things’
GEORG BASELITZ
Die Schwalbe (The Swallow) (1967) is an important early painting by Georg Baselitz, fusing elements of several of his groundbreaking series of the 1960s. Against an abstract background of sunlit green, a dramatically foreshortened semi-nude figure leans forward, face sternly stoic, arms out in the posture of flight. Painted in thick, expressive daubs, his ruddy, rough-hewn form undercuts any idea of takeoff. One foot rests on a thick branch, outlined in dark brown strokes below. His head hovers just above his neck; the left hand is likewise severed at the wrist, and the right at the elbow, dripping blood (or is it just paint?) into the air. This radical motif of fragmentation is typical of Baselitz’s ‘Fracture’ paintings of 1964-68, while the subject’s monumental, ramshackle physique relates him to the ‘Heroes’ of 1965-66: both series whose formal devices express the scarred, ruptured nature of the Germany Baselitz knew. Later, beginning with Der Wald auf dem Kopf (‘The Wood on its Head’) (1969), he would take the fracturing of the picture plane one step further, inverting it totally to ‘empty’ it of referential content. Although Baselitz often rejected the idea that his paintings had any subject matter at all, their biographical overtones are clear. With his defiant aesthetic of opposition and excess, he aimed to liberate painting from the shackles of narrative and symbolism and to dethrone its idols, partly in reaction to the art of the repressive National Socialist and Communist regimes that he had lived through. In 1995, he reflected that he ‘was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I didn’t want to re-establish an order: I’d seen enough of so-called order’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in ‘Goth to Dance: Georg Baselitz in conversation with Donald Kuspit’, Artforum, vol. XXXIII, no. 10, Summer 1995, p. 78). Die Schwalbe embodies this attitude with impressive bravura.
The year before he painted Die Schwalbe, Baselitz moved to the Rhineland countryside with his wife, having lived in West Berlin since 1957. This shift to a rural environment was something of a homecoming: born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938, Baselitz had grown up in (and took his name from) the small village of Deutschbaselitz in Saxony, East Germany. The Sorbian folklore of his youth seems to have found its way back into works like Die Schwalbe, their rustic palette and fairytale quality perhaps heightened by his recent return to field and forest. ‘There were no air spirits,’ the artist recalled of his childhood’s mythology; ‘just mostly earth spirits that lived in the woods, just above ground, that is. Everything threatening and everything benevolent came out of the ground. Nothing from the heavens. Except for aeroplanes, of course, towards the end of the war’ (G. Baselitz in conversation with H. P. Schwerfel, 1988, in D. Gretenkort (ed.), Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, London 2010, p. 148). Die Schwalbe was in fact the German nickname for the Messerschmitt Me 262 fighter plane, which played an important and brutal role in the Second World War. The title also makes ironic reference to the swallow as a natural symbol of hope, spring and renewal: Baselitz’s heavy, broken figure flatly denies art its transcendent prerogatives. There is nothing airborne about this gleefully earthy painting. The figure’s extreme foreshortening, along with the detail of a discreet loincloth, makes a mockery of the divine bodies who gaze down from the graceful clouds of Renaissance ceilings. Die Schwalbe is an image of fantasy and folly, mauling the established ideals of painting; it is also an icon of the new liberty Baselitz found in attacking convention in its every form, while paradoxically rooted in a disrupted, distinctly Germanic tradition.
‘I maintain that I’m not an Expressionist,’ Baselitz said in 1987, ‘because their methods involved making illustrative paintings, commentaries on how to change society and the world around us. I don’t have anything to do with all that. If I paint a cow green then at most this is a mistake, or the cow really is wearing green’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in M. Hanstein and L. Schmidt-Mühlisch, ‘The Picture Behind the Canvas is Not a Utopia’, Die Welt, No. 267, 16 November 1987, p. 9). This is a typically tricky assertion from a painter who strove for his medium’s total autonomy from the rest of the world. There are obvious links between Baselitz’s technique and the ‘expressive’, disharmonic and asymmetrical qualities of much German art, from Dürer and Cranach through to the extreme emotion and primitivist nature-cult of Die Brücke. Furthermore, while his paintings may not be ‘illustrative’ or ‘commentaries’, they inevitably sit within the particular social and political contexts that Baselitz railed against. After Die Schwalbe, he would return to the theme of flight with the Adler or ‘Eagles’ of the 1970s and 1980s. In these upside-down works he shot down the king of the birds, inverting and neutralising one of the most loaded symbols of German cultural heritage. This was Baselitz’s image of a ruined and misguided country, an aggressive antithesis to emblems of imperial might. Plunged to earth, the magnificent is made absurd. Taking earth as its starting point, Die Schwalbe instead pictures man failing to fly, and the foolishness of aspiring to magnificence in the first place. Fragmented, wounded and weighed down with history, Baselitz tackles the situation with anticlimactic humour and bold, renegade energy. Die Schwalbe at once embraces bathos, reimagines painting and acknowledges the trauma of a century, bringing together the central concerns of one of Germany’s greatest and most provocative postwar artists.