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拍品专文
Doktor Brot belongs to a group of paintings George Baselitz executed between 1988 and 1990, titled Ciao America. In the forward to the catalogue for the exhibition where these works were first exhibited, the artist wrote “How good, really, is one’s adhesion to the ground? To stand, to fall, to fly” (G. Baselitz, “Ciao America,” in Recent Paintings by Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London, 1990, p. 5). And, indeed, Baselitz has fashioned here liminal space, disorientation--a kind of “betweenness” that makes one giddy. Overlaying the still life of bread and tableware, North American titmice (more than a dozen) are rendered, child-like, in black linear markings; a circle attached to an elongated ovoid, two lines for wings, two lines for feet, and a single dot for the eye. Representations in Doktor Brot overlay what seems to be a blizzard of Cezanne-like passages, discrete daubs of the flat brush, disarrayed, overlapping, mingled, and finally converged into a forced density—a ground of cerulean blue and earth tones. This scenario, of course, is made legible only by turning the canvas on its head, literally. For Baselitz’s signature artistic strategy from 1969 forward is to render the image inversely, upside-down, in order to create visual, emotional, and psychic distance between the work and the viewer. By inverting the traditional orientation of the easel picture, Baselitz queries the critical terms for figuration, empties out meaning, and calls into question traditional expectations of aesthetic beauty. He also calls attention to the fact—and the act—of painting. Doktor Brot, then, appears to function on multiple levels. It can be understood as allegory or more simply, convey a representational narrative. It might be a scene from a folktale or a biblical parable. As Baselitz stated, “What comes hard: to get behind the mystery of pictures, whether by sympathy, by reflection, or by analysis—central focus or over the edge” (G. Baselitz, Ibid.). Yet, in its pictorial/narrational reversals as well as in its layered surface incidents, subject matter as such is rendered opaque, if not nil, and the artifice of painting is made manifest.
Viewing Doktor Brot “right side up” projects an entirely different scenario—one that is almost illegible from a realist perspective. Slashed markings overlaid by linear scrawls, albeit seemingly in the guise of finger painting, seem like bacchanalian transliterations of works by Philip Guston or Willem de Kooning. This is no surprise: Baselitz first saw the traveling exhibition, The New American Painting when he was a student at the Prussian Academy of Arts in West Berlin in the later 1950s. A yearlong tour of seventeen abstract painters, including Guston and de Kooning, conveyed, as director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. wrote in the press release, “a sensuous, emotional, esthetic, and at times a mystical power… [that] can be overwhelming” (A. H. Barr, Jr., “The New American Painting, Large Exhibition, Leaves for Year-Long European Tour,” International Council at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 11 March 1958). Baselitz was stunned: “We’d been adherents of the School of Paris, but this show blotted out that influence and surpassed it” (G. Baselitz quoted in P. Kort, “Georg Baselitz talks to Pamela Kort - ‘80s Then – Interview,” ArtForum, April 2003, p. 205). Yet, while influenced by the technique and the sense of extraordinary expressiveness and freedom apparent in these works, Baselizt’s own sensibility lay in parody, not homage. While citing style, he distances himself from it. Doktor Brot evinces a wonderfully absurdist quality, layered with an aggressive muscularity, delivering a deeply authentic sense of engagement with themes of postwar despair and redemption.
Doktor Brot’s animated surface—dynamic, playful, and forceful—belies his serious subject matter. These characteristics open Baselitz to a new arena in which to exercise his prodigious imagination and compulsion to create. The rough-hewn, sharp-edged, impasto in evidence here seems almost a translation from wood to paint. Speaking of his blunt cuts and incisions in sculpture, which he took up in 1979, the artist proclaims, “Sculpture is something very forward and aggressive” (G. Baselitz quoted in R. M. Mason, “Image and Painting,” Gemälde und Skulpturen 1960-2008, Salzburg, 2009, p. 46). Doktor Brot was painted at a time in the artist’s creative life when imaginative and aesthetic possibilities seemed infinite—an expansive moment in which the dialectic that fuels art-making would never end. As the artist states, “The '80s helped me to rearrange everything; I was able to set up a whole range of ideas and experiences anew, which meant I was able to break everything down so I could make something out of it again” (Op. cit., p. 208).
Viewing Doktor Brot “right side up” projects an entirely different scenario—one that is almost illegible from a realist perspective. Slashed markings overlaid by linear scrawls, albeit seemingly in the guise of finger painting, seem like bacchanalian transliterations of works by Philip Guston or Willem de Kooning. This is no surprise: Baselitz first saw the traveling exhibition, The New American Painting when he was a student at the Prussian Academy of Arts in West Berlin in the later 1950s. A yearlong tour of seventeen abstract painters, including Guston and de Kooning, conveyed, as director Alfred H. Barr, Jr. wrote in the press release, “a sensuous, emotional, esthetic, and at times a mystical power… [that] can be overwhelming” (A. H. Barr, Jr., “The New American Painting, Large Exhibition, Leaves for Year-Long European Tour,” International Council at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 11 March 1958). Baselitz was stunned: “We’d been adherents of the School of Paris, but this show blotted out that influence and surpassed it” (G. Baselitz quoted in P. Kort, “Georg Baselitz talks to Pamela Kort - ‘80s Then – Interview,” ArtForum, April 2003, p. 205). Yet, while influenced by the technique and the sense of extraordinary expressiveness and freedom apparent in these works, Baselizt’s own sensibility lay in parody, not homage. While citing style, he distances himself from it. Doktor Brot evinces a wonderfully absurdist quality, layered with an aggressive muscularity, delivering a deeply authentic sense of engagement with themes of postwar despair and redemption.
Doktor Brot’s animated surface—dynamic, playful, and forceful—belies his serious subject matter. These characteristics open Baselitz to a new arena in which to exercise his prodigious imagination and compulsion to create. The rough-hewn, sharp-edged, impasto in evidence here seems almost a translation from wood to paint. Speaking of his blunt cuts and incisions in sculpture, which he took up in 1979, the artist proclaims, “Sculpture is something very forward and aggressive” (G. Baselitz quoted in R. M. Mason, “Image and Painting,” Gemälde und Skulpturen 1960-2008, Salzburg, 2009, p. 46). Doktor Brot was painted at a time in the artist’s creative life when imaginative and aesthetic possibilities seemed infinite—an expansive moment in which the dialectic that fuels art-making would never end. As the artist states, “The '80s helped me to rearrange everything; I was able to set up a whole range of ideas and experiences anew, which meant I was able to break everything down so I could make something out of it again” (Op. cit., p. 208).