Ein Roter, 1966, is an icon of Georg Baselitz’s New Type, or Hero paintings (1965-1966), a series hailed by Siegfried Gohr as “the masterful conclusion of all his early efforts.”ⁱ  The work represents the solidification of Baselitz’s signature motifs across some of the most critical moments of his early career. It shows an artist coming into his own, navigating his cultural inheritance as a young German painter in the aftermath of World War II and a divided German state. As Gohr astutely notes, there is an overarching feeling of in-betweenness to this period of Baselitz’s career, as he moves between motifs, cultural myths, and taboos, and reckons with the existential uncertainty of constant reinvention that lies at the core of his life’s work.ⁱⁱ

 

Self-portrait and icon at once, the towering central figure of Ein Roter stands rooted, barefoot, in the barren countryside, his body loaded down with pack and military fatigues. The red beret and title, Ein Roter, which translates to “a red one,” hint to the Communist regime of Baselitz’s native East Germany, but any heroic Socialist Realism is quickly cancelled out by the hero’s unzipped trousers. Indeed, the painting is intentionally devoid of nationalism, or any sense of pride or boastfulness one might associate with a hero. The hero’s expression is wistful; he holds a striped flag of unknowable national origin, which falls between his legs. The scenery behind him is desolate, with a bare-bones house, a crushed wheelbarrow, and an ambiguous rectangle, perhaps a warehouse, or a large brick, sketched out in brown paint. The rest of the landscape scrapes like stubble across the background, then disappears into nothingness.

 

The present work is part of the subset of the Heroes series created in Baselitz’s studio in West Berlin in 1966. These canvases, with identical dimensions of 63 ¾ x 51 ⅛ in. (162 x 130 cm), foreground the Hero archetype, often with bare feet grounded into the landscape, and an upward, mournful facial expression. Ein Roter’s inclusion in a 1968 exhibition of Baselitz’s work is markedly early for a Hero painting—the group was not shown comprehensively until 1973—suggesting that the artist held this painting in esteem as representative of the series. 

 

 

Baselitz in Florence: Mannerist Forebears

 

Baselitz had learned about the Mannerists through books and prints in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and their artistic ethos inspired his Pandemonium period, c. 1961-1965, as seen in Untitled, 1963.  However, it was not until 1965, when he was granted a fellowship at the Villa Romana, Florence, that Baselitz encountered the Italian Mannerists’ paintings firsthand. Baselitz began his Heroes while a fellow at the Villa Romana, and we can directly see the influence of his exposure to Italian art on this series. 

 

In Ein Roter, Baselitz plays with the human form, color, and composition in a way that’s indebted to the Mannerists. Baselitz picks up on these artists’ penchant for painting figures with small heads, for instance—the head of Ein Roter is disproportionate to his broad chest. There is a painterliness to Ein Roter as well, seen in the contiguous pale pink and yellow line that twists through the hero’s body. The use of these fleshy colors, sinuous as Pontormo’s figural work, creates an uneasy effect, as if the outline of the figure is hovering over the hero’s earthen body.

 

Beyond such formal homage, the intellectual inheritance of Mannerism is present in Ein Roter, and the Heroes series at large. Baselitz studied art historian Gustav René Hocke, who wrote that the movement was “not only an expression of an intellectual crisis, but also an ‘awareness of a “profoundly unbalanced” world. […] “Mannerism” thus describes the specific aesthetic behavior of a particular type of man within history and towards all forms of reality.’”ⁱⁱⁱ These same words could describe Baselitz’s approach to painting the Heroes. 

 

 

The Fallacy of the Hero

 

For Baselitz, the division of East and West Germany, and the prolonged trauma of World War II, combined with the predominant cultural narratives surrounding these events, were signs of an unbalanced world in which the artist felt like an outsider.^iv He felt alone, existentially uncertain, and undefined. The Heroes are flush with the artist’s own ambivalence, his desire for a guiding artistic principle at war with his distrust of ideology in art. Ein Roter is tall and broad, almost brick-like in his visage, like a human wall at the fore of the picture plane, and yet he is abject in manner. There’s a melancholy in his upward expression, a limpness to his arms, a slope in his square shoulder, that reflects the artist’s own reservations about the idea of a hero in the first place. 

 

As the artist reflected years later, “I was born into a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society. And I didn’t want to re-establish an order: I’d seen enough of so-called order” in Nazi Germany, and Communist East Germany.^v Ein Roter, then, can be read as a re-ordering of heroic principles.

“The hero only becomes a hero by means of a venerable reception and is—like history itself—the result of a construction, subject to changing purposes and political intentions.”
—Uwe FlecknerThe hero is one of the oldest and most enduring types in human history and folklore. But, as Uwe Fleckner observes in his investigation of Baselitz’s Heroes, the hero, and which attributes of his are deemed heroic, are deeply dependent on his cultural context.^vi In Baselitz’s Post-War Germany, where Ein Roter was painted in his West Berlin studio in 1966, the hero, once the prop of Nazi nationalist propaganda, is now “a tabooed figure, which, as a result of war and despotism, [has] become eternally infused with guilt.”^vii In this cultural context, then, Baselitz’s use of heroic visual tropes in Ein Roter becomes deeply ironic, ambiguous, and emotionally fraught.

 

In Ein Roter, Baselitz calls on the tradition of European history paintings, which depicted Classical and Christian stories in which hero was always the largest figure, or the one to which all other figures turn or look in deference. Caspar David Friedrich’s heroic figures also come to mind, such as Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818, Hamburger Kunsthalle, which places a solitary man in the foreground against a majestic landscape.

 

In comparison, the hero of Ein Roter is far greater than the diminutive landscape behind him; the house and crumpled wheelbarrow are no larger than his feet, with the landscape itself stippled in receding brown marks at left, almost an afterthought compared to the worked, wrought surface of the hero’s body. Richard Shiff identifies these marks on the body as a graphic form of stress, an “unruly surplus energy” expressed through strokes of paint. Unlike the marks articulating the eyes and nose, Ein Roter’s stress-marks do not necessarily contribute to the construction of the human form on canvas. The stubble-like pink dashes across the figure’s crotch, for instance, or the same marks, dashing off the figure’s pack and into the background, are not representational; they “evoke an attitude, a posture, a state of feeling.”^viii

 

And it is this feeling, this contradictory feeling of being a modern German man—abject, yet staid; apathetic, yet guilty; tired, yet hopeful—that Baselitz captures in the figure of Ein Roter. He has the attributes of a hero, but not the attitude; he is a motif without meaning. The hero is thus inverted, in a massive step forward for Baselitz’s painting practice. From here, with the motif of the hero turned inside-out, Baselitz draws ever closer to his greatest innovation: the complete inversion of the picture plane in 1969.

 

 

ⁱ Siegfried Gohr, translated by Annie Bourneuf, Georg Baselitz: Works from the 1960s and 1970s, exh. cat., Foundation 20 21, 2006, p. 9.

ⁱⁱ Ibid., p. 5.

ⁱⁱⁱ Gustav René Hocke (1957), quoted in Max Hollein and Eva Mongi-Vollmer, eds., George Baselitz—The Heroes, exh. cat., Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 2016, p. 20.

^iv Gohr, p. 5.

^v Georg Baselitz (1995), quoted in Hollein and Mongi-Vollmer, p. 14.

^vi  Uwe Fleckner, “The Post-Heroic Hero: Georg Baselitz and the End of a Failed Ideology,” ibid., p. 48.

^vii  Ibid., p. 52.

^viii Richard Shiff, “Lost,” ibid., p. 42.