Georg Baselitz: The Heroes review Astonishing paintings take a savage swipe at history
By Jonathan Jones
When the German painter Georg Baselitz died this year a chunk of Europe’s rapidly diminishing historical memory went with him. Baselitz was born in 1938, experienced Hitler’s Germany and the second world war as a young child, then found himself growing up in communist East Germany before escaping to the west and becoming an artist. His acidic, honest perceptions of the history he’d lived through will no longer be those of the living person I was lucky enough to encounter. But he has left us a gift: an exhibition in London he helped plan of his most astonishing history paintings, The Heroes.
It’s a savage, merciless vision of modern history with feelings of horror, disgust and irreparable guilt hanging heavy in the poisoned air. But there’s a terrible joy too, the thrill of speaking the truth. You sense the liberation Baselitz must have felt when he set brush to canvas to start these paintings in 1965. Comparing the explosive rage and nihilism of his art to punk may be inadequate but the title of this series of colossal imaginary portraits is so scathingly ironic it’s like being spat at.
Mit Rote Fahne – or With the Red Banner – depicts a massive, square-shouldered yet exhausted soldier holding a half-lowered flag that is a smear of red and black. A banner of blood, the redness congeals to form black scabs that suggest the shadow of the swastika. All around the soldier is a wasteland. Do we owe him compassion? No, he had none. The devastated world at his feet was destroyed by Germany’s heroes who fought in the second world war. When Baselitz painted these furious homages in the mid-1960s, these men were running West Germany’s banks and car companies.
Another long-haired Hero, in a uniform with shorts, stands in a trashed, blood-stained landscape. This bland-faced character balances two crimson mittens, preparing apparently to let them go and to live on without these gory encumbrances, with clean hands.
It’s as if Baselitz was walking around the increasingly affluent streets of West Germany, seeing healthy, optimistic faces and retching at how easily the crimes of the second world war could be shoved into the past. The Holocaust only ended 20 years ago, these paintings scream, when the armies advancing on Hitler’s Reich discovered the places where six million Jews were systematically murdered – how can we Germans hold our heads high and strut on?
