ART MONOGRAPHS

Georg Baselitz
Making Art after Auschwitz and Dresden
59 minutes, color

In the fall of 2007, a brilliant retrospective exhibition of the work of Georg Baselitz opened at London’s Royal Academy of Arts. It was curated by Norman Rosenthal, who had first exhibited paintings by Baselitz in the early 1970’s. Baselitz traveled to London to lecture at the Academy and revisits his exhibition together with Rosenthal. They discuss the work, paintings and sculptures, and the artist’s beginnings
and progress. In the course of their conversations during the walk-through of this impressive exhibition, Baselitz’s post-World War II struggle to find a way to make art in a Germany that had lost the respect of the world, becomes evident.

In the late 1950’s Hans-Georg Kern, as Baselitz was then known, was one of the many artists who had moved to the West from the German Democratic Republic, the Russian-occupied Communist state. Kern changed his name to Baselitz in 1961 when the Communists began to build the Berlin Wall, in remembrance of his birthplace in Saxony, Deutschbaselitz. In West-Berlin, Baselitz was exposed to American Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art, after being immersed in Soviet Socialist Realism in the GDR. Visiting Paris, Amsterdam and Documenta in Kassel, he realized that he had to break out of this polarity and find his own way.

During a career spanning 50 years, the painting and sculpture of Georg Baselitz has created imagery that deals unflinchingly with his position as a post-war artist. The excesses of the Hitler-regime, World War II,
the bombing of Dresden and the division of Germany seemed more appropriate subject matter to Baselitz, who felt no connections to the prevailing art world directions. As he says in the film, “I am a German and needed to deal with German issues. I could not join the School of Paris, or American Abstract Expressionism, or where ‘die Brücke’ had left off in the 1930’s. I needed to be independent.”
In responding to contemporary experience and exploring his own painterly instincts, Baselitz creates symbols which reflect deep-rooted human dilemmas and concerns. Purity of expression and commitment to a purposeful painterly language has compelled Baselitz, as far as possible, to allow the paintings to become themselves so fully, that they stand out, not as products of any given time, but as timeless as cave paintings.

--- quoted in part from an exhibition brochure.