Cowboys! Eagles! Death! Georg Baselitz’s prints tell a shocking life story A new show at Bergen’s Kode Museum explores the life of the controversial artist
By Thom Waite
Georg Baselitz’s artworks turn the world on its head, quite literally. Throughout his career, the iconic German painter has depicted his pet subjects – eagles, deer, downtrodden ‘heroes’, and Elke, his wife and lifelong muse – upside down on the canvas. What was once dismissed as a gimmick has, over the course of six decades, solidified into something much more, complicating the symbols that resurface again and again from the artist’s personal and political history.
In a new exhibition at Bergen’s Kode, this full history is laid out – not in paintings but in prints, which the artist has produced as an integral part of his artistic process since the mid-60s. Aptly titled Georg Baselitz: A Life in Print, the show sees the museum taken over by topsy-turvy cowboys, scratchy nudes, birds of prey, and corpselike self-portraits. It’s an appropriate setting: just a couple of minutes away lies Kode’s collection of similar, bleak images by the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch, one of Baselitz’s artistic heroes.
Baselitz’s prints shouldn’t just be considered a companion to the more famous paintings, suggests curator Cornelius Tittel, because they actually get to the heart of his obsessions in a way that painting can’t. He repeats something he was told by Baselitz’s longtime studio director, Detlev Gretenkort: “The printmaking reminds him of an architect who builds a house, and then, when the house is already built, he delivers the floorplan.”
Baselitz himself expands on this idea in a conversation on printmaking, published alongside the museum show. “You can be sure that when you scratch a line into a resistant surface, this line – compared to a line in a drawing – will have a much greater finality about it,” he explains. This requires a lot to be figured out in advance, which Baselitz does throughout the year via painting and drawing. Only at the end of each year, in the winter months, does he tend to produce his prints, which he regards as “clarification of a form”. They are stark and stripped back, reduced to their most vital essence.
