Image: Georg Baselitz, Return to the Origins
Featured in artpress

Georg Baselitz, Return to the Origins Richard Leydier's review of the German artist's work dedicated to his retrospective at the Centre Pompidou

November 2021
Artpress

By Richard Leydier

I have often wondered why the paintings exhibited by Georg Baselitz in 1963 at the Werner & Katz Gallery (Berlin) so strongly re­sembled, in anticipation, those that the Ame­rican Philip Guston would produce from 1969 onwards. Baselitz/Guston, on the model of Soutine/de Kooning, is an exhibition that must be organised one day. Someone will have to take on this exciting task. 

Guston had probably never heard of Base­litz's paintings, nor of the scandal caused in Germany by that exhibition, which followed two years after the Pandemonic Manifesta that the young German painter wrote with Eugen Schiinebeck. The paintings Guston produced during the last ten years of his life synthesise his work through a return to the comic strips of his childhood, as well as clas­sical Renaissance art seen through this prism of popular culture. One might say "simpli­fied, reduced to the extreme by it''. The young Baselitz, on the other hand, looked at infor­mal art and abstract expressionism, Antonin Artaud and outsider artists. I remember at­tending the dinner given for his 70th birth­day. Before an audience of very distingui­shed museum curators from all over the world, he spoke about his first trip to Paris and his discovery of Fred Deux's work, which most of the guests had probably never seen. I took this to be a purely punk gesture: Base­litz, at the height of his career, was speaking, not about his own career, but to affirm how much the work of an artist of lesser renown had meant to him. (...) 

 

Atmospheric image Atmospheric image
Atmospheric image Atmospheric image
Atmospheric image Atmospheric image