White Cube, Mason’s Yard, SW1Y
20 May – 9 July
It is not difficult to see why Georg Baselitz is one of the world’s best-selling living artists. Here is a man who obviously enjoys painting, who delights in the very physicality of paint and its manifold expressive qualities. This unfettered joy emanates from the canvases like an infectious laugh, giving a palpable exuberance to the entire room. In his latest show at the White Cube, Baselitz effortlessly demonstrates the talent for making paint speak from the depths of the soul that has sustained his position in the artworld for nearly fifty years.
‘Between Eagles and Pioneers’ is a collection of new works that explore German history through the lens of cultural symbolism and personal memory. The exhibition is comprised of two series of large-scale canvases: on the ground floor, Be Prepared, Always Prepared, which is characterised by a warm yellow glow, and on the lower ground floor, Eagles’ and ‘Dogs goes for a cooling blue juxtaposed with arresting black. Together, they make a show of contrasts and even conflicts between emotions and ideas.
Those who are encountering Baselitz for the first time will be immediately struck by the deliberate mistake. The paintings seem to be hung upside down, which gives the whole show an intriguing element of surprise from the outset. In fact, as far as Baselitz is concerned, they are hung the right way up, which happens to be upside down. If, then, you are already familiar with Baselitz’s work, this is a comfortingly familiar technique which promises great things.
The upside down orientation of the paintings is important because it helps to enforce – in a literal, non-painterly way – a central tenet of Baselitz’s method. This is that whilst the paintings are, by his own admission, content-heavy and geared towards unravelling a complex history and cultural identity, it is crucial to understand that the message is only communicated through the medium itself. That is, through the very matter of the colours, lines, shapes, brushstrokes, drips and textures of the paint. Therefore, the paintings are hung upside down in order to subvert our attempts to read the paintings primarily or solely through the depiction of imagery.
The series, Be Prepared, Always Prepared, engages with Baselitz’s childhood experience of the Young Pioneer movement in Communist East Germany. The movement was similar to the Scouts in its emphasis on outdoor activities and readiness, but was designed by the Communist party to indoctrinate the young with its ideology. The paintings are portraits of two figures posing in the position of the Pioneers’ greeting. The yellow backgrounds make them glow with optimism, while the black drips and splashes that form the outlines speak of childish abandon. These pictures pay homage to fond memories at the same time as asking searching questions about past errors. This nostalgia, tinged with self-reflection, leads the pictures to falter somewhere between optimism and doubt, which is communicated by the careful layering of pigment and the delicate control of chaos in composition.
The Eagles series is altogether darker in the way that it scrutinises German cultural identity through the national symbol of the eagle, whose rhetorical force shifted dramatically for the worse after the second world war. Deepest black paint drips from the top of each canvas, all the way down to the bottom, partially obscuring the image of the eagle, as if trying to hide the shame or to symbolise blood spilt in its name. In contrast to the other series, these pictures fill one with a lingering disquiet, which is only mitigated by the fact that their sheer scale and Baselitz’s mastery of paint nonetheless make them easy and certainly pleasurable to look at.
There are also some smallish watercolours in this exhibition, exploring the same themes as the paintings. They are technically accomplished, of course, but do not add much to the show, either conceptually or aesthetically. The vigour, vibrancy and emotional energy of Baselitz’s work is in the way that he applies paint to the canvas in layers, subtly mixing colours, allowing the paint to drip freely and the globules to remain protruding. This effect is absent in the watercolours, which, encased behind glass, are too sedate to convey the vivacity of their subjects.
Very often, one has to find exactly the right angle and distance from which to view a painting in order to read it as a coherent composition. The real secret of these paintings is in the fact that they can be – and should be – viewed from all angles and distances. No matter where you stand in the gallery, they impart a moral of their story, whether it is in the surprising levels of detail close up or the lumps and bumps of pigment when viewed from the side across the plane of the canvas. This, again, is a result of the fact that Baselitz is not about depiction so much as he is about expression through physicality.
The major triumph of this show is that Baselitz treads the fine line between complexity and simplicity. The complexity of the subject, saturated in history and memory, is offset by the apparent simplicity of the paintings; and the simplicity of the paintings merely glosses over the complexity of the technique that produces them. The simple delight in the physicality of paint is pitted against the more complex delight in memory, which mirrors the emotionally confused messages of hope and doubt. Whether you choose to frame this as rampant expressionism or postmodern tomfoolery, it is the reason why these paintings are so endlessly fascinating and could realistically detain you in the gallery for hours on end.
