Georg Baselitz - Contemporary Art Part I New York Thursday, November 15, 2007 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    PaceWildenstein, New York

  • Exhibited

    New York, PaceWildenstein, Georg Baselitz: New Paintings, September 6 – October 5, 2002

  • Literature

    R. H. Fuchs and PaceWildenstein, eds., Georg Baselitz: New Paintings, New York, 2002, pp. 20-21 (illustrated); Vonderbank Gallery, ed., Georg Baselitz: Gemälde und Aquarelle 1970-2005, Berlin, 2006

  • Catalogue Essay

    Georg Baselitz’s paintings have always had an air of independence, of defiance even. As a young artist he studied with Hann Trier in West Berlin at the Academy of Fine Arts Berlin-Charlottenburg, West Germany when abstract expressionism was the dominant idiom. Baselitz’s interest and steadfast commitment to the figure distinguished him from being merely another painter with expressive brushstrokes. As there was an increasing rejection to anything that was not progressing towards pure abstraction, Baselitz found other artistic paradigms leading him to the study of anamorphosis, the distortion of images. With his grotesque distortions of the figure, he found affinity with Mannerist schools, such as Rosso Fiorentino and followers in the Fontainebleau School.The attenuated forms and odd color schemes provided enormous creative inspiration. Observations of his paintings of the 1960s yield the exaggerated hands,a feature exploited by the Mannerists. Baselitz bizarre figures began tobe turned upside down, and even tilted sideways as in the present lot,a compositional strategy that enhanced their unique nature. As pure abstract art rids the pictorial image of any sentimental narrative, Baselitz began to embrace it. Recent paintings such as Foto Frivol revealthe inspiration of traditional Russian imagery fused with his signature inverted figures with a particular relationship to Soviet Stalinist images from the 1930s. “The choice of that…imagery has significance. In all its socialist and propagandistic sentimentality as well as in its troubling deceptiveness, that imagery represents, in an extreme and controversial form, precisely what modernist abstraction has wiped out: the sentimental narrative painting….Yet…storytelling has returned to art in narrative installations and even more in narrative videos. As he once painted proud Heroes to match the proud Minimalism of Donald Judd, now Baselitz is making something like a last stand by matching narrative video with his version of narrative painting,” (R. Fuchs, George Baselitz: New Paintings, New York, 2002).

60

Foto Frivol (Frivolous Photo)

2002
Oil on canvas.
Diameter: 114 1/4 in. (290.2 cm).
Signed, titled and dated “’Foto Frivol’ 15.VII 21.VII.02 G. Baselitz” on the reverse.

Estimate
$250,000 - 350,000 

Sold for $657,000

Contemporary Art Part I

15 Nov 2007, 7pm
New York