The genius and torments of Georg Baselitz ‘In every slurp of paint, you see the Holocaust’
By Jonathan Jones
Georg Baselitz was a living thread of history and his death robs us of the truth he knew when we need it more than ever. He was one of the only two people I have spoken to for whom Nazi Germany was a living memory: Baselitz was born in 1938, making him far too young to bear any personal guilt but old enough – seven when the Third Reich fell – to retain direct experience and images of it.
In his art, he cut those images up, gored and eviscerated them in paintings of uniformed young enthusiasts with blood spurting from mangled limbs or entire bodies fed through some hellish grinder and roughly remade. Into the woods they went, these ironically titled “Heroes”, chopping and being chopped in the guilty depths of the German forest.
In every drop of paint Baselitz slurped and streaked, it’s hard to avoid seeing the Holocaust. Some artists would be irritated by such grand historical interpretations of their work, but after Baselitz wrote me a disarming letter a few years ago, we spoke. I wrote about him in a book he had approval of, and it became clear he absolutely recognised the shadow of history in his art. How could he escape it? At the start of the 1960s Baselitz, who had experienced not only Hitler but East German communism before crossing to the west, horrified a postwar West Germany that was trying to forget with obscene images of a rancid, shameful society.
His 1961 painting Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night Down the Drain) depicts a stunted character with flattened black Hitlerian hair and the hint of a square moustache, nude except for military-looking shorts, masturbating. In a later reworking, he made the masturbator’s identity even clearer. Baselitz would go on to paint upside-down German eagles as if flying above an infernal Berchtesgaden, which became the Nazis’ southern HQ, and carve a huge rough-hewn, polychrome wooden statue of a saluting Adolf who rises from a recumbent position like a mummy waking from its tomb.
