Baselitz’s Russenbilder Series
Der Brief von der Front (Laktionov), 1998, comes from George Baselitz’s Russenbilder (“Russian Pictures”) series, began the same year. Born in 1938, Baselitz grew up in what later became the Soviet-aligned German Democratic Republic, or East Germany, amidst the progression and aftermath of World War II. He began art school in East Berlin, where schools taught only Socialist Realism, before being expelled for ‘sociopolitical immaturity’ and enrolling in a West Berlin academy. Revisiting the contrasting artistic threads of his youth, the present example demonstrates the artist’s nuanced negation and comes from one of his most personal series.
Laktionov’s The Letter From the Front
Aleksandr Laktionov, The Letter From the Front, 1947, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Image: Bridgeman Images The title of the present work references the popular Soviet Union Socialist Realist painter Aleksandr Laktionov and his breakthrough work, The Letter From the Front, 1947. The painting, which features a multi-generational family gathered around a doorway while a young boy reads a soldier’s letter home, became a widely celebrated image in the Soviet Union, earning the Stalin prize in 1948 and later appearing on a postage stamp. Painted during the immediate aftermath of World War II, the work would have been familiar to a young Baselitz growing up in East Germany, where similar images populated textbooks used when the artist was a schoolboy. Like a Norman Rockwell of Socialist Realism, the hyperrealist, sentimental style has drawn criticism for both its artistic worth and politics. In Der Brief von der Front (Laktionov), Baselitz interprets the original with a removed irony.
“In my paintings I was recalling the things I had had to leave. To this day, I still cite people, landscapes and situations in the East. They are still my vocabulary.”
—Georg BaselitzThe Inverted Figure
Baselitz rescripts the Laktionov scene, turning it upside down in his trademark style. The maternal figure is now nude, which would have been strictly prohibited in Socialist Realist ideology, and now forms the center of the composition. The letter-reading child is positioned instead to the side. Their bodies are rendered in quick-handed black outlines beneath a wash of thin purple, mauve and yellow pigment, floating in an amorphous, non-specific space. The unsettling of the scene is a characteristic move for the artist, whose work, while figurative and psychologically charged, foregrounds the abstraction. In the words of the artist: “An object painted upside down is suitable for painting because it is unsuitable as an object. I have no notion about the solidity of the depiction. I don’t correct the rightness of the depiction. My relationship to the object is arbitrary. The painting is methodically organized by an aggressive, dissonant reversal of the ornamentation. Harmony is knocked out of whack, a further limit is reached.”i
Latter-Day Action Painting
Jackson Pollock, Greyed Rainbow, 1953, Art Institute of Chicago. Image: © Art Institute of Chicago / Gift of Society for Contemporary American Art / Bridgeman Images, Artwork: © 2024 Pollock-Krasner Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Baselitz has referred to his painting process as “latter-day action painting.” Laying out his canvases on the floor, the artist looks upon his work from a high ladder, applying sweeping, agitated brushstrokes and washes of thinly applied color. Revealed upon closer inspection, “traces of kinetic motion—footprints and rings left by cans of paint—are preserved on the canvas,” reminiscent of a Jackson Pollock.ii The thickly built-up circles can be seen adjacent to the figures’ feet and besides the woman’s head, creating subtle breaks in the composition. Baselitz’s work is reactionary to that of artists like Pollock and Willem de Kooning, who were at the forefront of Western art when he was coming of age. Where Socialist Realism dominated the art seen during his youth and taught during his early art school years in East Berlin, his later art school years in West Berlin from 1957-1962 brought exposure to the recent work of Abstract Expressionists. While visually unconnected, the two styles referenced within the present example represent rival political ideologies from opposite sides of the Iron Curtain. Der Brief von der Front (Laktionov) marks a salient reckoning from the artist, then in his 70s, of the disparate artistic factions concurrent to his youth.
i Georg Baselitz, quoted in Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995, p. 214
ii Georg Baselitz, quoted in Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2007, p. 177
Provenance
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg
Acquired from the above by the present ownerExhibited
Musée d'art moderne de Saint-Etienne Métropole; Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Georg Baselitz: Russenbilder, January 9, 2007–February 3, 2008, pp. 42–43, 168 (illustrated, p. 43)
Seoul, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Memory unforgettable, Georg Baselitz's Russian Paintings, pp. 116, 168 (illustrated)Literature
Daniela Papenberg, "Georg Baselitz. Russenbilder," Portal Kunstgeschichte, November 22, 2007, online
Detlev Gretenkort, ed. Georg Baselitz, Collected Writings and Interviews, London, 2010, p. 295 (illustrated)
Detlev Gretenkort, ed., Georg Baselitz, Gesammelte Schriften und Interviews, Munich, 2011, p. 295 (illustrated)
Richard Calvocoressi, Georg Baselitz, London, 2021, p. 312 (illustrated)
Hans Werner Holzwarth, Georg Baselitz, Cologne, 2022, p. 401 (illustrated)
Property from a Distinguished American Collection
Ο◆320
Der Brief von der Front (Laktionov)
signed, titled, inscribed and dated “G. Baselitz 3.VI.98 Laktionov 'Letter from the Front' [in Russian] ‘der Brief von der Front’ Laktionov” on the reverse
oil on canvas
79 1/2 x 63 3/4 in. (202 x 162 cm)
Painted on June 3, 1998.
Estimate
$400,000 - 600,000
Sold for $508,000
Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com
Modern & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session
New York Auction 20 November 2024
368
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370
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