Auch Ohne Schnee Winter (Even Without Snow Winter)

Bleached branches gleam brightly against a darkened sky in Georg Baselitz’s Auch Ohne Schnee Winter (Even Without Snow Winter), 2005. Bursts of yellow flash amongst the stark, slender trees, while a vigorous fuchsia gives shape to fallen boughs. Against the rich blackness, these colours are incandescent. The forest as a site to reimagine and investigate has long played a role in Baselitz’s prolific practice and these landscapes are personally resonant; as a young man, Baselitz’s applied to forestry school, and his paintings are populated by woodsmen, woodland creatures and sprawling trees. Bound up with Germanic folklore traditions and entrenched within the cultural memory of the people, the forest also serves as the metaphorical heart of the country’s psyche. As the writer Elias Canetti observed, ‘Not in any modern nation in the world has the spirit of identification with the forest [Waldgefühl] remained so vital’ (E. Canetti quoted in N. Rosenthal (ed.), Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2007, p. 121). Strikingly, the image of Auch Ohne Schnee Winter is inverted, a strategy Baselitz introduced in the late 1960s to destabilise the experience of his paintings and the hallmark of his practice. By rotating his night-time scene, Baselitz offers new ways of seeing, explaining that ‘I was born into a destroyed order and I didn’t want to re-establish an order’ (G. Baselitz interviewed by D. Kuspit, in ‘Goth to Dance,’ Artforum, vol. 33, Summer 1995, p. 76). Fittingly, the first work Baselitz painted upside down, The Wood on Its Head, 1969, was also a pastoral landscape. Through these works Baselitz creates a continuous dialogue with the work of the German Romantics, including Caspar David Friedrich, who regularly depicted the sublime wooded countryside as part of a larger engagement with their cultural heritage. In these paintings, the land is presented as a divine inheritance. Accordingly, upending a forest has unique implications within the German context, and in his reorientation, Baselitz responds to his homeland’s troubled history, ultimately providing a new lens for thinking about the past. With its jagged geometries and vivid colours, Auch Ohne Schnee Winter advances a bold reconfiguration of a national identity.