Georg Baselitz was born in a village in Saxony in 1938, less than two years before the outbreak of the Second World War. His father, a schoolteacher and Nazi sympathiser, was conscripted into the Wehrmacht and took part in the invasion of Poland. After the defeat of Germany in 1945 Saxony was occupied by the Russians and later became part of communist East Germany.
Baselitz thus experienced life under two totalitarian régimes, Nazism and Communism, giving him a lasting mistrust of authority. Expelled by his art school in East Berlin for ‘socio-political immaturity’, he moved to West Berlin in 1957, aged nineteen, to continue his training, and became a West German citizen.
While renouncing the hollow figurative imagery of Socialist Realism, the prescribed style in the eastern bloc, Baselitz soon came to reject the fashionable, watered-down version of American abstract expressionism, known as tachism or art informel, that he encountered in Western Europe. Instead, he forged a new artistic language born of his interest in existentialism and ‘outsider’ art, both of which he had recently discovered.
His was an art that neither eliminated the human figure nor ignored the moral and spiritual challenges posed by the catastrophe of Nazism and world war. His anti-hero paintings of the mid-1960s, that depict bleeding, bedraggled, disorientated figures in destroyed landscapes, reminded a ‘master race’ preoccupied with material prosperity of truths they would rather have forgotten.
From the late 1960s Baselitz became increasingly disillusioned with art that sought to convey a message of any kind. By painting the subject – head, figure, landscape, still life – upside down or on its side, he hoped to direct the viewer’s attention away from content or meaning and towards the process of painting itself. At times this led him close to abstraction – for example, in canvases whose scale and flat handling of paint recall abstract expressionism.
In this talk, Richard Calvocoressi hopes to demonstrate that narrative content has not disappeared completely from Baselitz’s art: autobiography and memory, including memory of his own earlier work, play a crucial role. In spite of his international reputation as one of the most radical and authentic artists of our time, Baselitz remains at heart a German. Unlike many German artists of his generation, by embracing a Gothic tradition of Hässlichkeit (ugliness), he has consciously acknowledged rather than denied his German roots.
The talk will be conducted in English, with simultaneous translation into Turkish.
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Date: 14 September 2024, Saturday
Time: 2pm - 3.30pm
Location: SSM Conference Hall
