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拍品專文
‘These are fantastic paintings – not just studies of feet, but expressive, thoroughly elaborated compositions. It is hard to believe that they are works created by an artist in his early twenties, at the beginning of his career … they are macabre, destructive scenarios that challenge and titillate the viewer with taboo-transgressing thrusts into the domain of the sublime. But these works too can be read as an expression of the tormented search for an identity as artist and citizen in a new country. Baselitz isolates a part of the body and lets it speak all the clearer for the totality. The foot fragments are in that sense Baselitz’s Scream’
–Helle Crenzien
A series of rare and singular importance, held in the same distinguished private collection for forty years, Georg Baselitz’s 11 P.D. Feet is a seminal suite of early works that announced his artistic ambitions to the world. Painted between 1960 and 1963, and reunited by the present owner in the 1970s, these revolutionary canvases offer visceral depictions of wounded feet, rendered with intuitive painterly marks in richly marbled palettes. The initials P.D. signify the works’ allegiance to the artist’s ‘Pandemonic’ manifestos of 1961-62: apocalyptic texts that called for art to embrace the carnal, the convulsive and the mystical, and which gave rise to early masterpieces such as The Big Night Down the Drain, 1962- 63 (Museum Ludwig, Cologne). Having moved from East to West Germany in 1958, Baselitz felt that artists on both sides were unwilling to engage with the pain of the country’s recent past, hiding behind the aesthetics of Socialist Realism and Western abstraction respectively. His bruised, bloodied feet – representing man’s primal point of contact with the earth – embody his desire to confront the trauma embedded in his native soil. Neither wholly figurative or abstract, their fleshy forms evoke the raw pulsations of reality, channelling the influence of Chaïm Soutine, Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism. Originally dispersed among a number of owners – including Sigmar Polke as well as the artist and his wife – the P.D. Feet were first shown together as a group of eleven at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1983. They have since been included in important exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2006), the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2007) and were recently displayed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., as part of the Fondation Beyeler’s major touring retrospective.
‘I proceed from a state of disharmony, from ugly things’, said Baselitz; ‘… from feet that are too big’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in R. Shiff, ‘Feet Too Big’, in Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2007, p. 26). Born into a divided world, he believed that it was only by embracing the grotesque, the unseemly and the ‘degenerate’ that art might begin to engage with Germany’s recent history. Indeed, his first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz in 1963 caused a public outcry, with two paintings confiscated on the grounds of obscenity. Adopting the name of his East German hometown shortly after his move to the West, Baselitz deliberately styled himself as an outsider. The P.D. Feet bear witness to the eclectic range of sources he encountered during travels in Europe and America, including Jurgis Baltrušaitis’ 1955 book Anamorphic Act, Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 thesis Artistry of the Mentally Ill, the Symbolist work of Mikhail Vrubel, the metamorphic paintings of Arcimboldo and the hallucinatory poetry of Lautréamont. He studied Matthias Grünewald’s rendering of diseased skin in the Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1510-15), Théodore Géricault’s Studies of Feet and Hands (1818-19), and the work of contemporary artists such as Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier. A trip to Paris sparked a fascination with Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, which impelled art forms to assault the senses through spectacles of shock. He hitchhiked to Amsterdam to see the work of Rembrandt alongside Soutine’s Le Boeuf écorché (1926), claiming that the latter’s paintings ‘were an almost perfect reflection of a world out of kilter’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in D. Gretenkort (ed.), Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, London 2010, p. 267). Synthesising these influences into a polemical painterly language, the P.D. Feet stand among the most radical products of this fertile early period.
‘Feet ground me’, the artist has claimed. ‘… Receiving through being grounded works much better for me than through an antenna’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in K. Wittneven, ‘Seeing Old Friends Again’, in Georg Baselitz: The Bridge Ghost’s Supper, exh. cat., Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 2007, p. 52). Though likened in some respects to his later fascination with tree roots – as embodied by works such as Die Baum (1966) and Der Wald auf dem Kopf (1969) – Helle Crenzien argues that the P.D. Feet are better understood as metaphors for Baselitz’s own sense of itinerant ‘rootlessness’ as he sought to come to terms with his identity. Many of the works’ individual subtitles, most notably Russian Foot, The Old Native Country and Celt, support this observation. As a young boy, growing up in the village of Deutschbaselitz, the artist relished the historic artefacts – including Slavic potsherds – that he would occasionally dig up from the ground surrounding his family home. These relics revealed to him that the ‘German’ soil of his native land, with all its associated nationalistic doctrine, had once been inhabited by others: Russians, Celts and Sorbs. In his early twenties, as Baselitz took his place in the unfamiliar surroundings of West Germany, these formative lessons rang loudly in his ears. ‘[U]nlike the roots of trees, which truly fix the body’, writes Crenzien, ‘the feet offer flexibility. Someone who has feet has no roots. The foot is thus a strong, but also a complex metaphor. Baselitz confronts existential antonyms like remaining and leaving, being immobile or mobile, stable presence and nomadic activity’ (H. Crenzien, ‘Paintings that captivate and repel: P.D. Füsse 1960-1963’, in Baselitz: Painter, exh. cat., Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, 2006, p. 13).
For Baselitz, then, the P.D. Feet may be understood as expressions of liberation: symbols of the freedom to transgress boundaries, to challenge hierarchies and to counteract accepted modes of expression. The Heroes of 1965-66 would wander barefoot through post-apocalyptic wastelands, cast off like pilgrims on a journey to a new world. By 1969, the metaphor would give way to Baselitz’s signature inversion of the canvas: a bold proclamation of his non-allegiance to representation’s historic truth claims. His focus on the body – both in the P.D. Feet and in other works depicting hands, heads and sexual organs – was part and parcel of this rebellion, standing in ideological counterpoint to the strains of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art that were increasingly being paraded around West Berlin. Shortly after his arrival in the city in 1958, Baselitz had attended the ground-breaking exhibition The New American Painting, on tour throughout Europe from the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Whilst the painterly language of Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston certainly caught his eye, Baselitz positioned himself firmly in opposition to the movement’s broader claims to spiritual transcendence: something which had already begun to infiltrate European Tachiste circles. Looking instead to his encounters with Rembrandt and Soutine, Baselitz’s P.D. Feet reject the notion of paint as a portal to the sublime, using its properties to create a sense of corporeal perishability and decay. Across the surface, pigment scumbles, disperses and disintegrates; colour, texture and form become one. Baselitz’s feet fluctuate between fleshy figuration and painterly abstraction, wrenching themselves away from opposing traditions and declaring a new purpose for art.
‘Baselitz isolates a part of the body and lets it speak all the clearer for the totality’, writes Crenzien. ‘The foot fragments are in that sense Baselitz’s Scream’ (H. Crenzien, ‘Paintings that captivate and repel: P.D. Füsse 1960-1963’, in Baselitz: Painter, exh. cat., Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, 2006, p. 12). The comparison with Munch is apt: Baselitz’s later work would turn again to the theme of feet, most notably in his 2004 work Ekely. The painting, which shows a pair of isolated feet and lower legs hanging from the top edge of the canvas, was inspired by a photograph of the Norwegian artist, seated in his studio in Ekely near Oslo. Taken by Munch himself, the image crops the artist at his shins, leaving his feet absent from the composition. In reimagining this missing part of the photograph, Baselitz pays homage to the influence of his Expressionist predecessor, placing Munch’s feet on the path by the Sandteichdamm – a place from his own childhood. Smartly booted in black patent leather, they are a far cry from the raw, visceral surfaces of the P.D. Feet, painted nearly four decades previously. Yet conceptually, they speak to the same notion: namely, that the ground we traverse – both geographically and artistically – is free from ownership; that others once stood upon the land we claim as ours. Created in the wake of one of the most turbulent periods known to European soil, the radical topographies of the P.D. Feet take on a poignant, newly poetic dimension.
–Helle Crenzien
A series of rare and singular importance, held in the same distinguished private collection for forty years, Georg Baselitz’s 11 P.D. Feet is a seminal suite of early works that announced his artistic ambitions to the world. Painted between 1960 and 1963, and reunited by the present owner in the 1970s, these revolutionary canvases offer visceral depictions of wounded feet, rendered with intuitive painterly marks in richly marbled palettes. The initials P.D. signify the works’ allegiance to the artist’s ‘Pandemonic’ manifestos of 1961-62: apocalyptic texts that called for art to embrace the carnal, the convulsive and the mystical, and which gave rise to early masterpieces such as The Big Night Down the Drain, 1962- 63 (Museum Ludwig, Cologne). Having moved from East to West Germany in 1958, Baselitz felt that artists on both sides were unwilling to engage with the pain of the country’s recent past, hiding behind the aesthetics of Socialist Realism and Western abstraction respectively. His bruised, bloodied feet – representing man’s primal point of contact with the earth – embody his desire to confront the trauma embedded in his native soil. Neither wholly figurative or abstract, their fleshy forms evoke the raw pulsations of reality, channelling the influence of Chaïm Soutine, Art Informel and Abstract Expressionism. Originally dispersed among a number of owners – including Sigmar Polke as well as the artist and his wife – the P.D. Feet were first shown together as a group of eleven at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, in 1983. They have since been included in important exhibitions at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek (2006), the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2007) and were recently displayed at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C., as part of the Fondation Beyeler’s major touring retrospective.
‘I proceed from a state of disharmony, from ugly things’, said Baselitz; ‘… from feet that are too big’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in R. Shiff, ‘Feet Too Big’, in Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2007, p. 26). Born into a divided world, he believed that it was only by embracing the grotesque, the unseemly and the ‘degenerate’ that art might begin to engage with Germany’s recent history. Indeed, his first solo exhibition at Galerie Werner & Katz in 1963 caused a public outcry, with two paintings confiscated on the grounds of obscenity. Adopting the name of his East German hometown shortly after his move to the West, Baselitz deliberately styled himself as an outsider. The P.D. Feet bear witness to the eclectic range of sources he encountered during travels in Europe and America, including Jurgis Baltrušaitis’ 1955 book Anamorphic Act, Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 thesis Artistry of the Mentally Ill, the Symbolist work of Mikhail Vrubel, the metamorphic paintings of Arcimboldo and the hallucinatory poetry of Lautréamont. He studied Matthias Grünewald’s rendering of diseased skin in the Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1510-15), Théodore Géricault’s Studies of Feet and Hands (1818-19), and the work of contemporary artists such as Jean Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier. A trip to Paris sparked a fascination with Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’, which impelled art forms to assault the senses through spectacles of shock. He hitchhiked to Amsterdam to see the work of Rembrandt alongside Soutine’s Le Boeuf écorché (1926), claiming that the latter’s paintings ‘were an almost perfect reflection of a world out of kilter’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in D. Gretenkort (ed.), Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, London 2010, p. 267). Synthesising these influences into a polemical painterly language, the P.D. Feet stand among the most radical products of this fertile early period.
‘Feet ground me’, the artist has claimed. ‘… Receiving through being grounded works much better for me than through an antenna’ (G. Baselitz, quoted in K. Wittneven, ‘Seeing Old Friends Again’, in Georg Baselitz: The Bridge Ghost’s Supper, exh. cat., Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 2007, p. 52). Though likened in some respects to his later fascination with tree roots – as embodied by works such as Die Baum (1966) and Der Wald auf dem Kopf (1969) – Helle Crenzien argues that the P.D. Feet are better understood as metaphors for Baselitz’s own sense of itinerant ‘rootlessness’ as he sought to come to terms with his identity. Many of the works’ individual subtitles, most notably Russian Foot, The Old Native Country and Celt, support this observation. As a young boy, growing up in the village of Deutschbaselitz, the artist relished the historic artefacts – including Slavic potsherds – that he would occasionally dig up from the ground surrounding his family home. These relics revealed to him that the ‘German’ soil of his native land, with all its associated nationalistic doctrine, had once been inhabited by others: Russians, Celts and Sorbs. In his early twenties, as Baselitz took his place in the unfamiliar surroundings of West Germany, these formative lessons rang loudly in his ears. ‘[U]nlike the roots of trees, which truly fix the body’, writes Crenzien, ‘the feet offer flexibility. Someone who has feet has no roots. The foot is thus a strong, but also a complex metaphor. Baselitz confronts existential antonyms like remaining and leaving, being immobile or mobile, stable presence and nomadic activity’ (H. Crenzien, ‘Paintings that captivate and repel: P.D. Füsse 1960-1963’, in Baselitz: Painter, exh. cat., Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, 2006, p. 13).
For Baselitz, then, the P.D. Feet may be understood as expressions of liberation: symbols of the freedom to transgress boundaries, to challenge hierarchies and to counteract accepted modes of expression. The Heroes of 1965-66 would wander barefoot through post-apocalyptic wastelands, cast off like pilgrims on a journey to a new world. By 1969, the metaphor would give way to Baselitz’s signature inversion of the canvas: a bold proclamation of his non-allegiance to representation’s historic truth claims. His focus on the body – both in the P.D. Feet and in other works depicting hands, heads and sexual organs – was part and parcel of this rebellion, standing in ideological counterpoint to the strains of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art that were increasingly being paraded around West Berlin. Shortly after his arrival in the city in 1958, Baselitz had attended the ground-breaking exhibition The New American Painting, on tour throughout Europe from the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Whilst the painterly language of Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston certainly caught his eye, Baselitz positioned himself firmly in opposition to the movement’s broader claims to spiritual transcendence: something which had already begun to infiltrate European Tachiste circles. Looking instead to his encounters with Rembrandt and Soutine, Baselitz’s P.D. Feet reject the notion of paint as a portal to the sublime, using its properties to create a sense of corporeal perishability and decay. Across the surface, pigment scumbles, disperses and disintegrates; colour, texture and form become one. Baselitz’s feet fluctuate between fleshy figuration and painterly abstraction, wrenching themselves away from opposing traditions and declaring a new purpose for art.
‘Baselitz isolates a part of the body and lets it speak all the clearer for the totality’, writes Crenzien. ‘The foot fragments are in that sense Baselitz’s Scream’ (H. Crenzien, ‘Paintings that captivate and repel: P.D. Füsse 1960-1963’, in Baselitz: Painter, exh. cat., Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, 2006, p. 12). The comparison with Munch is apt: Baselitz’s later work would turn again to the theme of feet, most notably in his 2004 work Ekely. The painting, which shows a pair of isolated feet and lower legs hanging from the top edge of the canvas, was inspired by a photograph of the Norwegian artist, seated in his studio in Ekely near Oslo. Taken by Munch himself, the image crops the artist at his shins, leaving his feet absent from the composition. In reimagining this missing part of the photograph, Baselitz pays homage to the influence of his Expressionist predecessor, placing Munch’s feet on the path by the Sandteichdamm – a place from his own childhood. Smartly booted in black patent leather, they are a far cry from the raw, visceral surfaces of the P.D. Feet, painted nearly four decades previously. Yet conceptually, they speak to the same notion: namely, that the ground we traverse – both geographically and artistically – is free from ownership; that others once stood upon the land we claim as ours. Created in the wake of one of the most turbulent periods known to European soil, the radical topographies of the P.D. Feet take on a poignant, newly poetic dimension.