“Everything which happened to be behind the painter is at once before him, too”
—Georg Baselitz

Between East and West: Baselitz’s Early Years in Germany

 

Painted in 2002 and belonging to the artist’s notable Russenbilder (Russian Paintings) series, Georg Baselitz’s Ein unvergessener Tag represents a conceptually rich and stylistically pivotal moment in the artist’s career. Energetically executed, the central figures reach for one another’s hands in a gesture of tenderness and unity, their more heavily impatsoed bodies giving way to softer, more diffused passages of paint as the inverted composition dissolves into a wash of polka dots. Establishing certain compositional and stylistic features of the artist’s later Remix series, Ein unvergessener Tag looks to the past as much as it anticipates the future, Baseltiz appropriating familiar imagery associated with Stalinist-era Socialist Realism as a way of considering visual culture’s relationship to both personal and political histories. Included in the significant travelling exhibition Georg Baselitz: Russenbilder, which represented the first presentation of this body of work in a German-speaking country, Ein unvergessener Tag crystalises key thematic and stylistic currents in the artist’s practice at the turn of the century.                                                                                                                 

Roots of the Russenbilder Series

 

Born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 into what he has famously described as ‘a destroyed order, a destroyed landscape, a destroyed people, a destroyed society’, Baselitz grew up in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, which would go on to become part of the Soviet-aligned German Democratic Republic (DDR) in the aftermath of World War II.ⁱ Although his early practice was informed by the restrictive brand of Socialist Realism promoted by the Academy of Fine and Applied Art in East Berlin where he commenced his studies, by 1957 his challenges to this dogmatic approach had resulted in his expulsion on grounds of ‘socio-political immaturity’, prompting his relocation to West Berlin and his artistic reinvention as ‘Georg Baselitz’.
 

Early on in his career, Baselitz made a name for himself as an outsider; he actively refused both the styles of Socialist Realism associated with the DDR and the vogue for abstraction then dominant in West Germany. Confronting the trauma of Germany’s recent past, Baselitz instead drew on a variety of art historical and more literary sources. In their examination of existential angst and absurdity, Baselitz’s early and important paintings highlight the fundamental importance of writers such as Samuel Beckett and Antonin Artaud in shaping his artistic vision, while stylistically they point to the formative legacy of German Expressionism and the acerbic satire of artists such as Otto Dix whose raw and uninhibited depictions of German society during the Weimar Republic exposed the brutality of conflict and the complicity of those who enabled such violence, while shattering nationalistic narratives of the heroism of war.
 

East Germany and the legacy of Socialist Realism

 

Baselitz first commenced work on his Russenbilder series just eight years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these new directions taken in his practice throughout the 1990s deeply enmeshed with the politics and culture of reunification that defined the period. Painting less heavily and working in a lighter palette, Baselitz adopted a looser, more experimental approach to painterly style and composition, many of the works from this series characterised by the polka dot motif seen here, or a distinctly Pointillist treatment of small, scattered brushstrokes of bright colour. For his source material, Baselitz turned to a range of second-hand images, most notably familiar examples of paintings from the Stalinist era. Characteristic of the mode of Socialist Realism that Baselitz himself would have been very familiar with growing up in East Germany, these paintings functioned as propagandist visions of an idealised Soviet life.
 

A pictorial arrangement that Baselitz has returned to in more than one composition, Ein unvergessener Tag borrows key compositional elements from Russian Soviet painter Vasilii Efanov’s An Unforgettable Meeting from 1936-1937, now held in the Institute of Russian Realist Art in Moscow. The artist depicts a celebratory exchange between a young woman and the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin at a Communist Party conference, the pair shaking hands behind an imposing wooden table displaying miscellaneous sheets of paper and red, white, and pink flowers. Efanov’s painting resembles a wedding scene: a man dressed in a black suit stands in the background between the woman and Stalin, assuming the place of a priest. The crowd surrounding the jovial exchange applaud with great enthusiasm and flowers pleasantly decorate the entirety of the composition.

 

 

Baselitz evidently recognised the romantic implications underscoring Efanov’s Socialist Realist depiction, suggestively titling his 2002 painting Ein unvergessener Tag, or ‘an unforgettable day.’ In reimagining the painting, Baselitz strips the source image of all superfluous figures, excavating the central couple as his subject and amplifying the intimacy of their exchange. In his appropriation and treatment of Efanov’s image, Baselitz disrupts the uncritical transfer of nationalistic ideologies embedded within it, his well-established strategy of inverting his compositions as a means of interrupting his viewer’s experience radically extended in this series with the polka dot and Pointillist motifs. Here, billowing washes of thinned black paint achieve a transmutive quality, further interfering with any straightforward reading of the image and introducing a surreal quality which works to emphasise the conceptual distance between the real and remembered.
 

Accomplishing an ‘expansive transformation’ of his motif here, it is in these gaps between the real, remembered, and imagined that Baselitz develops his critique of visual culture’s relationship to supposed ideological truths.ⁱⁱ In her analysis of a sister work Rasterpunkte außer Konkurrenz, Yvette Biro recognises the tension established between ‘the abstract yet physical reality of [Baselitz’s] inspiring imagination.’ She recognises that the source imagery has been filtered through time and memory: ‘Thus his rendering goes beyond simple narrative storytelling, because the abstraction is intrinsically part of it.’ⁱⁱⁱ

German Post-War Artists: Interrogating the Image

 

Toni Stoos describes the Russenbilder ‘as airy scenarios and far-off impressions that liberate their respective motifs from the memory of once-imposed aesthetic norms.’^iv Baselitz’s ability to interrogate and subvert the supposed truth of images is shared amongst his German contemporaries, notably in the pictorial strategies developed by artists such as Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke. In his early photorealist paintings, Richter interrogated the relationship between painting, photography, and truth, his controversial series based on the Badder-Meinhoff prisoners taking a socio-historically loaded image not unlike the popularised visions of a benevolent Stalin and exposing the complex interactions between history, memory, and morality. Similarly, throughout his series of Rasterbilder - notably again sometimes featuring infamous historical figures such as Lee Harvey Oswald - Polke established the raster or polka dot motif as a means of visually subverting and calling into question the apparent validity and purpose of the media images that his paintings appropriate.
 

Baselitz’s Ein Unvergessener Tag is a remarkable and incredibly potent example of his transformative series of Russenbilder. The painting speaks to a generation of post-war German artists who had to contend with the deeply problematic and complex image culture of their country’s recent history. For many of these artists, as with Baselitz, this meant interrogating the past to carry on in the present.
 

 

Collector’s Digest

 

• Painted in 2002, the present work belongs to German artist Georg Baselitz’s significant series of Russenbilder (Russian Paintings) created between 1998 and 2002 where the artist appropriated imagery associated with Stalinist-era Socialist Realism. The present work reinterprets a well-known painting by Vasilii Efanov.
   

• The work was included in the major travelling exhibition Georg Baselitz: Russenbilder, held in multiple locations between 2007 and 2008. 
   

• Baselitz’s works are included in some of the most important collections world-wide, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Tate in London, and Musée nationale d'art moderne, centre Georges Pompidou. 
   

• Baselitz has been the subject of major exhibitions globally, including solo shows at Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice (2022); Centre Pompidou, Musée national d’art moderne, Paris (2021); Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington (2018)

 

 

ⁱ Georg Baselitz, quoted in ‘Goth to Dance: Donald Kuspit Talks with Georg Baselitz’, Artforum, vol. 33, no. 10, Summer 1995, p. 76.

ⁱⁱ Rudi Fuchs, ‘Baselitz: The Unpredictable’, in Georg Baselitz: New Paintings, exh. cat., PaceWildenstein, New York, 6 September-5 October 2002, n.p.

ⁱⁱⁱ Yvette Biro, ‘A Repainted General: Georg Baselitz Filtering the Past’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, vol. 25, no. 3, September 2003, p. 99.

^iv Toni Stoos, ‘Preface’, in Georg Baselitz: Painting and Sculpture, 1960-2008, exh. cat., Museum der Moderne Salzburg, p. 15.