Inspired as much by Italian Mannerists as Georg Baselitz’s own Pandemonium Manifestos of 1961-1962, Untitled, 1963, provides insight into the artist’s process at a critical point in his early career. Throughout his life as a figurative artist, Baselitz has worked to make recognizable motifs unrecognizable, an effort that came to its most longstanding realization with his inversion of the human figure starting in 1969. Untitled shows an artist working through his motifs of choice—the human figure and the landscape; the heart, the phallus, the cross—reckoning with the legacies of formal representation in art, and reclaiming the German avant-garde.

 

Untitled presents a chaotic mass of limbs and landscape. A thick line of white gouache pierces through the heart of the central figure, dividing the composition into upper and lower portions. At top, Baselitz paints a rich cerulean blue sky, with splotches of dark blue in overlapping washes. The line isolates the figure’s unusual face above the rest of the work—it is grey and mottled, without discernable features, save an arresting, dark eye. Yet, the highly worked surface, with built up layers of gouache, watercolor, and oil pastel in the grey mass, shows the intention behind this obscuring effect.

 

Below the line, Untitled descends into pandemonium. The bright blue sky connects to an arid, acid yellow landscape, bordered by two bare trees and a picket fence. One knows that the central shape is a human figure, and yet, the visual signs of humanity are mixed up, misplaced, ambiguous. There is a bloodied, yellow expanse of chest; the figure’s right arm arcs down, with black-outlined fingers pinching a phallus, which seems disconnected, facing the opposite direction from the body it might be attached to. A limp, phallic shape curls in lieu of a left arm. As for the figure’s legs and feet, these body parts devolve into a knotted mass, crudely outlined in oil pastel at the bottom of the composition. It is as if the figure stands in the ruin of itself, a half-human held up in a pile of dismembered limbs.

 

“Blasphemy is with us, blastogenesis (blossoming of excrescences) is with us, paleness and blue are ours.”
—Georg Baselitz, Pandemonium Manifesto I, second version, 1961

 

Untitled dates to Baselitz’s Pandemonium period, c. 1961-1964, when the artist’s output was most strongly informed by the Pandemonium Manifestos he produced with fellow artist Eugen Schönebeck in 1961 and 1962. These manifestos, first exhibited as illustrated lithographs, were an act of catharsis, an ardent reclamation of the repulsive edges of the human experience, and a provocative desire to represent these edges, this pandemonium, in art. Baselitz called for “the bloated, warted, gruel-like, and jellyfish creatures, limbs and interlaced erectile tissue,” a line, indeed, that describes the central figure of the present work.ⁱ Untitled is not, explicitly, titled as a Pandemonium Drawing (a designation made by the artist by the initials P.D. at the start of titles, such as P.D. Zeichnung, 1963, The Museum of Modern Art, New York), however, the work dates to the Pandemonium period and examines the same formal and philosophical tropes as other P.D. works.

 

Art historian Shulamith Behr argues that Baselitz’s works from the early 1960s represent a quest for “creative self-ethnology,” or, the development of one’s own visual language out of a wider cultural inheritance.ⁱⁱ As an artist coming of age in Post-War Germany (the Berlin Wall was built concurrent to the writing of the Pandemonium Manifestos), Baselitz rejected both Eastern Socialist Realism and Western Abstract Expressionism, instead seeking his own formula, inspired by the “outsiders” of art history. As Behr writes, “creative self-ethnology involved an embrace of estranged identities: the asocial, the insane, the deviant and the amoral; categories deemed ‘degenerate’ during the Third Reich.”ⁱⁱⁱ

 

 

“In me there is... the Mannerists’ addiction to excess, a tangle of tendrils and artifices, coldness and devotion…”
—Georg Baselitz, Pandemonium Manifesto I, first version, 1961

 

Curator Isabelle Dervaux argues that Baselitz’s approach to figuration in his Pandemonium period was inspired by the Mannerists, whose artwork experienced a surge in academic interest in the 1950s and 1960s, with the 16^th century painter, Pontormo, as a particular hero of his.^iv The Mannerists used exaggeration and contortion to counter the harmonious aesthetic of the Renaissance; Baselitz, too, with his Pandemonium figuration, as seen in Untitled, reacted against the rigidity of Socialist Realism, and the aesthetic unity of Abstract Expressionism. There is an echo of Pontormo’s twisting, overlapping limbs in the swarming body parts of Untitled; the bright blue sky recalls the elder artist’s bold use of color, especially blue, in his altarpieces. Per Baselitz, the Mannerists “reacted to the established order by trying to uproot it… So there sprang up a tradition of irrational emotion, manifested in formal irregularity, as a way of recovering existential originality.”^v The same words could apply to Baselitz himself and Untitled.  

 

The artwork of mentally ill people, as reproduced in Hans Prinzhorn’s 1922 text, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, is another art historical precedent for Untitled.^vi Similar to the impact of the Mannerists, the influence of Artistry of the Mentally Ill plays out in both formal and philosophical terms in Untitled. Baselitz, like Jean Dubuffet, Paul Klee, and Max Ernst before him, found an aesthetic and compositional freedom in the artworks illustrated in Prinzhorn’s text.^vii Under the logic of the Nazi regime, avant-garde artists were equated with the mentally ill, and thus designated as degenerate.^viii Baselitz confronts this history, and the attendant unprocessed wartime trauma, both taboo in Post-War Germany, through his invocation of an outsider, avant-garde aesthetic.^ix Untitled, with its confusing compositional logic and disturbing, severed forms, reclaims the German avant-garde as a source of national and personal pride.

 

Untitled presents the majority of the visual motifs present in Baselitz’s 1960s works, namely, the solitary figure in a desolate landscape, and the symbols of the phallus, the heart (indicated in two arcs of red across the body), and the cross (as an X marking the spot next to the artist’s signature). Per Rudi H. Fuchs, Baselitz’s works on paper act as an essential foil to the artist’s paintings, ensuring that his motifs, which he works so hard to destabilize on canvas, remain untethered. As Fuchs writes, “the motif must not achieve finality, because that would make it content… The drawing cuts through the picture, just as the individual brushstrokes in the picture cut through or even tear apart the motif, so that it becomes pure artistic construction.”^x Untitled, in scrambling together Baselitz’s motifs, frees them up to perform as “pure artistic constructions” in his paintings.

 

The white line cutting through Untitled, too, is an essential visual marker of Baselitz’s formal metamorphosis across the 1960s. As he continued to work in the mid-1960s, a horizontal line becomes a necessary compositional detail, allowing the artist to divide motif from content, and figuration from representation, even further. His persistent fragmentation of the picture plane, and the imagery it contained, led to a stylistic shift c. 1966-1967, as visible in the Hero painting, MMM in G and A, 1966, The George Economu Collection, for instance, where the picture plane is divided, horizontally, in two, with different angles and realities existing above and below that line.

 

This progressive fragmentation, and detachment from pictorial convention, led to Baselitz’s radical inversion of the figure on the picture plane in 1969—“a provocation and, for Baselitz, at the same time an inner liberation,” as Antonia Hoerschelmann writes.^xi Untitled thus stands as one of the earliest visual clues towards Baselitz’s future as an artist. It is a rare and essential relic, a consummate Pandemonium period masterpiece in itself, and an indicator of the innovation to come.

 

 

ⁱGeorg Baselitz, “Pandemonic Manifesto I, Second version, 1961,” in Detlev Gretenkort, ed., Georg Baselitz: Collected Writings and Interviews, London, 2010, p. 27.

ⁱⁱShulamith Behr, “Pandemonium Paintings” in Norman Rosenthal, et al., George Baselitz: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2007, p. 51.

ⁱⁱⁱ Ibid.

^iv Isabelle Dervaux, “It’s all about looking backwards,” in Dervaux, et al., Georg Baselitz: 100 Drawings from the beginning until the present, exh. cat., The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, 2022, pp. 23-24.

^v Baselitz, quoted ibid., p. 23. 

^vi “George Baselitz: Paintings and Drawings from the 1960s: Press Release,” David Zwirner (formerly Zwirner and Wirth), Sep. 2002, online.

^vii Sam Dolbear, “Hans Prinzhorn’s Artistry of the Mentally Ill,” The Public Domain Review, Feb. 29, 2019, online.

^viii Ibid.

^ix Antonia Hoerschelmann, “’It mustn’t be compliant, but rather oblique’: An Approach to the Complexity of Georg Baselitz’s Paintings,” in Dervaux et al., p. 13.

^x Rudi H. Fuchs, quoted ibid., p. 11.

^xi Hoerschelmann, p. 14.