'Controversial Painter Georg Baselitz Knew His Venice Show Would Be His Last. He Went Out Quietly. Exhibition review
By George Nelson
Six days after the death of Georg Baselitz, his longtime dealer Thaddeaus Ropac opened an exhibition in Venice this week that the artist had already accepted would be his last.
At the Fondazione Giorgio Cini on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, “Eroi d’Oro” (“Heroes of Gold”) brings together the final paintings Baselitz made in his lifetime. He died in April at 88, and in a prerecorded film made for the show, he refers to the works without hesitation as “my last paintings.” He says he intended them as a kind of “summation” of everything he had done.
When ARTnews spoke to Baselitz just days before his passing, he was even more direct. “I have a long biography to look back on,” he said. “I have painted an incredibly large number of pictures over the course of more than 60 years. Now that I’m more or less at the end of my painting activity, I thought I should draw some kind of conclusion.”
It is a rare note of finality from an artist who built his reputation on a refusal of good taste and, often, of what was considered fashionable. From the scandal of his early figurative work in the 1960s, through the upside-down paintings that became his signature, to the wooden figures shown at the 1980 Venice Biennale that appeared to salute like broken monuments, his practice was defined by disruption. But the exhibition that Baselitz wanted to be his last is more a distillation of his career than another controversial show.
The paintings are enormous, almost architectural in scale, and covered in gold ground. Across this luminous surface, Baselitz drew thin, ink-like figures, either himself or his wife Elke, lying horizontally, as if seen from above. The bodies float in an undefined space, at once intimate and strangely cosmic.
Baselitz was uncharacteristically precise about what the gold was doing when I spoke to him. “Gold absorbs space, shadows, spatiality,” he said. “And on top of that, just a drawing, as if on a piece of paper, a nude drawing … as fine as I could manage.”
That idea of subtraction rather than addition runs through the entire series. The bodies are reduced to thin black lines. They become ephemeral.
Baselitz has rarely used these gold grounds, which he connected them to Fayum mummy portraits, Sienese altarpieces, and Byzantine icons, all of which depict the dead. “The effect of these images is that the portrait exists in a spaceless or shadowless condition,” he said. (...)
