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拍品專文
‘ The hierarchy which has located the sky at the top and the earth at the bottom is, in any case, only a convention. We have got used to it but we don’t have to believe in it. The only thing that interests me is the question of how I can carry on painting these pictures.’
– Georg Baselitz
Porträt des Mitglieds der Akademie I. P. Pavlov II (M Nesterov) (Portrait of the member of the Academy I. P. Pavlov II (M Nesterov)) is a vivid 1999 painting from Georg Baselitz’s series of Russenbilder (Russian Paintings). Informed by his childhood and the years of training Baselitz spent in East Germany during the Second World War, then under the occupation of Soviet troops, the works in this series are each based on paintings representative of Socialist Realism, the aesthetic program enforced in advocacy of the Revolution and, later, in Stalinist propaganda. Marking a stylistic break in Baselitz’s work, which had long been laden with thick, expressive oil paint, the series employs fluid washes and dabs of colour in an almost watercolour-like approach. The present work is based on Mikhail Nesterov’s Portrait of Ivan Pavlov (1935). With Baselitz’s typical disregard of the rules, this subject is flipped 45 degrees anti-clockwise and painted in haphazard Pointillist style against a white background. Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) was the Soviet Union’s most famous scientist. His theory of the ‘conditioned reflex’ had been central to the Stalinist project of mechanising the human machine. In Nestorov’s painting, made toward the end of Pavlov’s life, the scientist is absorbed by the observation of a bouquet of white flowers; his arms are outstretched and his hands clenched on a sheet of virgin paper. In Baselitz’s version, a blank white void is created at the lower third of the painting, as if Pavlov is gazing at the prospect of his own disappearance. The scientist is atomised: the small, loose dots with which he is depicted seem to threaten him with dissolution, and put the smooth illusionism of Nestorov’s Socialist Realist painting in abstract crisis. His face, described in more solid lines, gives way from the tired resignation of Nestorov’s version to a comically childish and anguished expression. Reframing art history, disrupting pictorial convention and subverting the aura of the grand portrait, Baselitz transforms his source material with politically-pointed bravura
– Georg Baselitz
Porträt des Mitglieds der Akademie I. P. Pavlov II (M Nesterov) (Portrait of the member of the Academy I. P. Pavlov II (M Nesterov)) is a vivid 1999 painting from Georg Baselitz’s series of Russenbilder (Russian Paintings). Informed by his childhood and the years of training Baselitz spent in East Germany during the Second World War, then under the occupation of Soviet troops, the works in this series are each based on paintings representative of Socialist Realism, the aesthetic program enforced in advocacy of the Revolution and, later, in Stalinist propaganda. Marking a stylistic break in Baselitz’s work, which had long been laden with thick, expressive oil paint, the series employs fluid washes and dabs of colour in an almost watercolour-like approach. The present work is based on Mikhail Nesterov’s Portrait of Ivan Pavlov (1935). With Baselitz’s typical disregard of the rules, this subject is flipped 45 degrees anti-clockwise and painted in haphazard Pointillist style against a white background. Ivan Pavlov (1849-1936) was the Soviet Union’s most famous scientist. His theory of the ‘conditioned reflex’ had been central to the Stalinist project of mechanising the human machine. In Nestorov’s painting, made toward the end of Pavlov’s life, the scientist is absorbed by the observation of a bouquet of white flowers; his arms are outstretched and his hands clenched on a sheet of virgin paper. In Baselitz’s version, a blank white void is created at the lower third of the painting, as if Pavlov is gazing at the prospect of his own disappearance. The scientist is atomised: the small, loose dots with which he is depicted seem to threaten him with dissolution, and put the smooth illusionism of Nestorov’s Socialist Realist painting in abstract crisis. His face, described in more solid lines, gives way from the tired resignation of Nestorov’s version to a comically childish and anguished expression. Reframing art history, disrupting pictorial convention and subverting the aura of the grand portrait, Baselitz transforms his source material with politically-pointed bravura