“These works spring more directly from the use of paint and are more expressive, and above all more colourful, than Baselitz’s previous paintings. The individual brushstroke is emphasized: it not only structures the pictorial layout, it also contributes substantially to the increasing forcefulness with which the thematic idea is handled and the individual motif developed and varied.”
—Andreas Franzke

Its central, inverted figure roughly hewn in thick, chunky passages of vibrant colour, Blaues Akkordeon exemplifies Georg Baselitz’s approach to painting during this pivotal period. Executed in 1985, the work records the renewed freedom and expressive energy with which the artist approached his subject matter and central motifs during the 1980s, its saturated palette and masterful handling aligning the work to his contemporaneous and critically acclaimed series of Strandbilder, Orangenesser, and Trinker paintings while also highlighting his experiments in a range of different media including sculpture and woodcuts. Shifting restlessly between figuration and more abstract passages of paint, the entire surface of the work is activated with tactile, expressive brushwork, epitomising Baselitz’s own memorable description of his painterly process as ‘boxing with both hands’.ⁱ 
 

A World Turned Upside Down

 

It was in 1969 that Baselitz first made the radical move to invert his compositions in what would go on to become a defining feature of his practice. Deliberately complicating the legibility of his motifs, Baselitz successfully divorces figurative content from meaning, directing the viewer’s attention instead to the painterly qualities of texture, colour, and mark making. As the artist has described: ‘[t]he object expresses nothing at all. Painting is not a means to an end. On the contrary, painting is autonomous. And I said to myself: if this is the case, then I must take everything which has been an object of painting – landscape, the portrait, and the nude for example – and paint it upside down. That is the best way to liberate representation and content.^’ii  In the context of the shock and devastation of the Second World War, the paintings also serve a critical function, prompting viewers to challenge the accepted order of things and highlighting how quickly such seemingly stable structures can collapse, as if the world itself had been turned upside down.

 

Developing this pictorial approach through the 1970s, Baselitz was enjoying a period of increased international acclaim and notoriety by the beginning of the 1980s. Selected to represent Germany alongside Anselm Kiefer in the 1980 La Biennale di Venezia, Baselitz was also included in the epoch-defining A New Spirit in Painting hosted by the Royal Academy of Arts in London the following year at the same time as a major travelling retrospective debuted at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Solo exhibitions premiering works from Baselitz’s new series in New York also followed, along with the 1983 survey show Expressions: New Art from Germany organised by The Saint Louis Art Museum and the Royal Academy’s German Art in the Twentieth Century. 

 

The 1980s would prove to be decisive in the maturation of Baselitz's visual language too, notably during his extended visits to Italy where he rented a studio near Arezzo and expanded his repertoire of motifs with reference to Piero della Francesca’s frescos, which he was able to study in person nearby. Widely regarded as ranking amongst the artist’s most important works, paintings made during this decisive period displayed a more robust engagement with the art of the past, drawing on central art historical themes such as the Passion of Christ and the Pieta and displaying a new interest in chromatic variation and intensity. Her blonde head occupying the lower portion of the canvas, head inclined as she looks down to her expressive, raised hands, the subject of the present work directly recalls the appearance and pose of Baselitz’s more overt engagements with these religious motifs where the blue accordion in the present work is replaced by a small child, replicating the familiar iconography of the Madonna and child treated so reverently by Piero della Francesca. 
 

It was at his 1980 Biennale presentation that Baselitz debuted his new sculptural experiments for the first time. Roughly carved with a chainsaw, chisel, and axe, these works drew on examples of so-called primitive and folk art and would be of central importance to Baselitz’s artistic development through the decade, standing in a particularly close stylistic relationship to Blaues Akkordeon. Although Baselitz has described sculpture as ‘more primitive and brutal than painting’, these legacies are clearly being worked through in the present work with its expressionistic brushwork and bold, non-naturalistic accents. Bearing a strong stylistic resemblance to the energetic mark making of German Expressionism, the ‘all-over’ surfaces and chromatic intensity evoke the gestural exuberance of Abstract Expressionist Willem de Kooning’s Women. Although Baselitz would himself disavow such influences on his work, claiming to ‘have never had any relationship with Expressionism’, the expansive, interconnected cycles of vibrantly coloured and roughly modelled work from this important period would secure the artist’s reputation as a leading proponent of German Neo-Expressionism and would prove to be the ground that Baselitz would continue to build on into the twenty-first century.ⁱⁱⁱ

 

Collector's Digest

 

• One of the most significant German artists to emerge from the post-war era, Georg Baselitz’s painting is rooted in these cultural contexts. Executed in 1985, the present work comes from an important period in the artist’s career as he started to receive more widespread critical recognition and embarked on his first sculptural experiments. 
• Baselitz’s works are included in the permanent collections of the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Fondation Beyeler in Basel, and the Berlinische Galerie, amongst others. 
• The subject of many solo exhibitions in cities around the world including New York, London, Paris, Berlin, and Hong Kong, he has most recently been honoured with a significant retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne - Centre Pompidou which explored his six-decade career in detail. 

 

ⁱ Georg Baselitz, quoted in Pamela Kort, ‘80s Then: Georg Baselitz Talks to Pamela Kort’, Artforum, April 2003, p. 207.
ⁱⁱ Georg Baselitz, quoted in Angelika Muthesius, Georg Baselitz, Hohenzollernring, 1990, p. 88.
ⁱⁱⁱ Georg Baselitz, quoted in Diane Waldman, Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995, p. 149.