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拍品专文
‘Painting is not a means to an end. On the contrary; painting is autonomous. And I said to myself: if this is the case, then I must take everything which has been an object of painting – landscape, the portrait and the nude, for example – and paint it upside-down. That is the best way to liberate representation from content’ GEORG BASELITZ
With its vibrant palette, toppled composition and exhilarating permeation of representation and abstraction, Ach, Morgenrot, so schön (Ah, Dawn, so beautiful) is a recent example of Georg Baselitz’s enduring and powerful oil painting. In addition, the work stylistically and figuratively reveals the artist’s deep admiration for Willem de Kooning’s expressive and emancipatory approach to painting. Against a blotchy background of punchy green, blue, black and orange hues, Baselitz inverts the rugged, sketchy form of a woman, whose face is tantalizingly concealed behind a block of white at the bottom of the composition. The capsized nature of the figure is emphasised by a dripped curtain of white paint, which streams vertically down the canvas, as though the artist is reminding us of his signature method of inversion. Baselitz’s ‘upside down’ paintings were initiated by the artist in 1969. Partially as a vehicle through which to confound visual expectations in order to metaphorically renew a lease on life, these synonymous works hamper the viewer’s comprehension of figurative content. ‘The problem’, Baselitz explained in a 1988 interview, ‘is not the object in the picture, but the picture as an object… so I solved it… by painting my objects, my motifs upside down; representing them without the meaning that an object can have. Because if you turn them upside down, they lose that meaning’ (G. Baselitz, ‘George Baselitz in conversation with Heinz Peter Schwerfel’ in George Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, London, 2010, p. 184). In Ach, Morgenrot, so schön, this inversion is made especially disorientating by the superimposed veil of gushing white paint.
In addition to channelling a self-acknowledged Germanic perversity of spirit, Baselitz’s gestural, impulsive brushwork recalls the anguished spontaneity and grotesque figurative studies of a favourite abstract expressionist. In 1958, at the age of twenty, Baselitz saw a Berlin exhibition of works by Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Sam Francis and Willem de Kooning. Alongside his European origins, it was the latter’s approach to abstraction and figuration that was to have the biggest impact. Enraptured by de Kooning’s torturous approach to the human form, his explosive palette and liberation of expression, once proclaiming that ‘most of what you see as freedom is de Kooning’, Baselitz borrowed de Kooning’s figurative motifs and modes of expression for his own compositions (G. Baselitz, quoted in ‘Down on the upside: the topsy-turvy painting of George Baselitz’, New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/03/down-upside-topsy-turvy-painting-georg-baselitz [accessed 4 September 2017]). This endeavour reaches a potent summit with Ach, Morgenrot, so schön, where the folded arms and primitive, sculptural bust compositionally and emotively evoke the grotesque ecstasy of de Kooning’s Woman I (1950–52), with the artist erasing the head containing that distinctive sadistic smile to avoid figurative familiarity. Having inverted the image for an immediate divorce of content from meaning, Baselitz adopts de Kooning’s formal and figurative ambiguities to further this separation. In a riot of form and abstraction, Ach, Morgenrot, so schön asks the viewer to neutralise their perceptual preconceptions, plunging them into Baselitz’s vivid world of electrifying tonality, stuttering representation and emotional effluence.
With its vibrant palette, toppled composition and exhilarating permeation of representation and abstraction, Ach, Morgenrot, so schön (Ah, Dawn, so beautiful) is a recent example of Georg Baselitz’s enduring and powerful oil painting. In addition, the work stylistically and figuratively reveals the artist’s deep admiration for Willem de Kooning’s expressive and emancipatory approach to painting. Against a blotchy background of punchy green, blue, black and orange hues, Baselitz inverts the rugged, sketchy form of a woman, whose face is tantalizingly concealed behind a block of white at the bottom of the composition. The capsized nature of the figure is emphasised by a dripped curtain of white paint, which streams vertically down the canvas, as though the artist is reminding us of his signature method of inversion. Baselitz’s ‘upside down’ paintings were initiated by the artist in 1969. Partially as a vehicle through which to confound visual expectations in order to metaphorically renew a lease on life, these synonymous works hamper the viewer’s comprehension of figurative content. ‘The problem’, Baselitz explained in a 1988 interview, ‘is not the object in the picture, but the picture as an object… so I solved it… by painting my objects, my motifs upside down; representing them without the meaning that an object can have. Because if you turn them upside down, they lose that meaning’ (G. Baselitz, ‘George Baselitz in conversation with Heinz Peter Schwerfel’ in George Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, London, 2010, p. 184). In Ach, Morgenrot, so schön, this inversion is made especially disorientating by the superimposed veil of gushing white paint.
In addition to channelling a self-acknowledged Germanic perversity of spirit, Baselitz’s gestural, impulsive brushwork recalls the anguished spontaneity and grotesque figurative studies of a favourite abstract expressionist. In 1958, at the age of twenty, Baselitz saw a Berlin exhibition of works by Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, Sam Francis and Willem de Kooning. Alongside his European origins, it was the latter’s approach to abstraction and figuration that was to have the biggest impact. Enraptured by de Kooning’s torturous approach to the human form, his explosive palette and liberation of expression, once proclaiming that ‘most of what you see as freedom is de Kooning’, Baselitz borrowed de Kooning’s figurative motifs and modes of expression for his own compositions (G. Baselitz, quoted in ‘Down on the upside: the topsy-turvy painting of George Baselitz’, New Statesman, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/03/down-upside-topsy-turvy-painting-georg-baselitz [accessed 4 September 2017]). This endeavour reaches a potent summit with Ach, Morgenrot, so schön, where the folded arms and primitive, sculptural bust compositionally and emotively evoke the grotesque ecstasy of de Kooning’s Woman I (1950–52), with the artist erasing the head containing that distinctive sadistic smile to avoid figurative familiarity. Having inverted the image for an immediate divorce of content from meaning, Baselitz adopts de Kooning’s formal and figurative ambiguities to further this separation. In a riot of form and abstraction, Ach, Morgenrot, so schön asks the viewer to neutralise their perceptual preconceptions, plunging them into Baselitz’s vivid world of electrifying tonality, stuttering representation and emotional effluence.