On Georg Baselitz At the Fondazione Cini
By John-Paul Stonard
Eroi d’Oro, an exhibition at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice (until 27 September), contains Georg Baselitz’s final works. He died six days before the show opened, at the age of 88. Sixteen monumental paintings are displayed in two large rooms lined with black fabric; the building adjoins the church of San Giorgio Maggiore, famous for its great late works by Tintoretto, the Last Supper and The Israelites in the Desert. Most of the paintings are close to five metres tall and each portrays a single inverted figure drawn with a fine, searching black line on a shimmering golden ground. All but one depict Elke Kretzschmar, Baselitz’s wife.
They are portraits of a marriage, but also images of a body approaching the extremes of old age. Flesh folds around a thickened abdomen; limbs are attenuated. Ankles become brittle; legs worry about giving out, unable to support the torso to which they are attached. The body seems to be collapsing into itself. A smaller canvas (still around three metres high) depicts Baselitz himself. He is shown seated – upside down of course – his hands crossed, head lifted to draw the dry skin around his neck, the loose flesh sagging upwards. The body, like the line that draws it, is thinned, spluttering, vulnerable. It looks like the self-portrait Hokusai drew in old age, which Baselitz knew of and admired. ‘Until the age of seventy,’ Hokusai said, ‘nothing that I drew was worthy of notice.’
The sense that Eroi d’Oro is a memorial exhibition is heightened by the eerie presence of Baselitz’s voice in a short film accompanying the show. And yet the mood is upbeat – the work doesn’t announce itself as drawing to a conclusion. Patchwork flurries of coloured paint, like crumpled rainbows, appear on some of the figures: an afterthought, Baselitz tells us, that just felt right. They are an echo of Willem de Kooning’s abstract gestures, a memory of paintings Baselitz saw in West Berlin in the late 1950s and which cast their spell over his work for decades. His rainbows are painted with hooked, directionless marks, a little like the ‘crab’s claw’ brushstrokes of traditional Chinese painting. And then there are de Kooning’s ‘Woman’ paintings of the 1950s, clearly part of Baselitz’s personal pantheon, though he rejects de Kooning’s violence, or any claim for the authenticity of expressive gestures. The scumbles of colour are more like floating fig leaves, a form of protection: the rose, cobalt and sienna daubs compensate for the thinness of the aged bodies, giving them back some life, like fruit growing on an old tree. Baselitz’s voice echoes around the gallery: ‘I wanted to construct my connection to the world, to myself and to my wife. The means for this should be as simple and as ordinary as possible.’
