Big Review: Georg Baselitz: Naked Masters at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna

Bold pairings of paintings by the contemporary German artist with those of the Old Masters are both provocative and elegiac

By John Paul Stonard

Ten years ago, the exhibition Background Stories at Dresden’s Residenzschloss paired paintings by the German artist Georg Baselitz with works from the nearby Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister. Rather than the originals, however, paintings such as Raphael’s Sistine Madonna (1512-13) were shown as giant digital reproductions. It was a bold and thought-provoking solution to the problem of hanging contemporary art alongside Old Masters, putting Baselitz’s paintings into a life-sized musée imaginaire.

Baselitz: Naked Masters at the Kunsthistorisches Museum is another pairing with Old Master paintings—this time, however, the encounter is real. Five large galleries and surrounding cabinet spaces have been hung with paintings by Baselitz from the past five decades. Alongside and underneath are 40 or so paintings from the 16th and 17th centuries, including works by Titian and Correggio, and many by Bartholomeus Spranger, a Flemish artist who worked at the court of Rudolf II in Prague.

It is no surprise to learn that the exhibition was selected and hung for the most part by Baselitz himself. The tone is set in the first gallery by an enormous paint-spattered canvas hung high over a delicate Adam and Eve (around 1485) by Hans Memling, the outer wings of an altarpiece, while Albrecht Altdorfer’s Lot and his Daughters (1537) is flanked by three upside-down Baselitz figure paintings from the early 1970s. At first sight, there seems little correspondence between new and Old Masters, the sequence of galleries proving rather their complete difference and irreconcilability.