Georg Baselitz's final exhibition is a warning that history is repeating itself Eroi d'Oro in Venice
By John-Paul Stonard
The standout show in Venice this year is also one of the most poignant. Georg Baselitz died a week before the opening of the exhibition of his paintings Eroi d’Oro (Golden Heroes) on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore (until 27 September). In two large rooms, very large upright paintings show a single inverted naked figure drawn with a fine black line on a golden ground. The figures are all, with one exception, images of Elke Kretzschmar, the artist’s wife. The exception is a smaller inverted portrait of the artist himself, looking a little like Hokusai in a famous self-portrait drawing (which Baselitz some years back used as the inspiration for a series of works) once again naked and appearing in extreme old age.
Baselitz’s voice echoes around the space. He recorded two short statements that are shown on a video monitor, describing the paintings as a ‘summation’ of his life and work, although leaving it for the visitor to work out what this might mean. The paintings are meditations on old age, restoring dignity to the ageing body, and great hymns of praise to Elke, the central subject of his imagination for more than six decades. They also show how deeply history and politics are embedded in Baselitz’s work. The effect of the upside-down paintings, after all these years, is to make us realise that it is the world that is topsy-turvy. Life has been turned upside down one last time.
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Following the destruction and defeat of the Third Reich, Georg Baselitz was the first German artist to create lasting symbols of such a historic moment, in the form of the ‘hero’ paintings from the mid-1960s. A memorial exhibition of these will take place later this year at Thaddaeus Ropac gallery. The ‘heroes’ are battered figures of soldiers, poets and painters wandering through a bleak war-torn landscape.
They are based on Baselitz’s earliest memories of Red Army soldiers entering Germany at the end of the war, and retreating remnants of the Wehrmacht. But they have a far wider resonance, and are part of the legacy of a great artist who combined a deep conservatism in his attitude to technique and his study of the art of the past, with a resolute avant-garde involvement in challenging forms of art. The heroes remain symbols of our time, struggling through a darkening world, and asking the question: what now?
