Painted in 1982, during Georg Baselitz’s most commanding period of painterly production, Das letzte Selbstbildnis I (The last self-portrait I) is a painting of extraordinary impact drenched in fiery reds, yellows and blues. It belongs to a series of paintings which pays homage to Edvard Munch’s late self-portraits, with examples being held in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart and the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. The present masterwork presents its protagonist in Baselitz’s signature upside-down format, with his head twisted to side and a slash of light paint running down his naked body. Arranged within a prismatic network of tactile and vibrant brushstrokes, the lively red-yellow colours inhabiting the portrayed figure plunge the surrounding background into infinite darkness.

 

Appearing before the viewer in a colossal scale of two and a half metres, Das letzte Selbstbildnis I (The last self-portrait I) evinces a raw, savage beauty, as well as an inimitable conceptual rigour that characterises the very best of Baselitz’s work. Following his selection to represent Germany at the 1980 Venice Biennale, the artist participated in a series of influential exhibitions across the globe which led him to international recognition, including A New Spirit in Painting in 1981 at the Royal Academy, London, Documenta 7 in 1982 and the landmark exhibition Zetgeist that same year at the Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin. Created at a turning point in the artist’s career, the present masterpiece contains all the seminal idiosyncracies that propelled Baselitz to international fame, as he attained worldwide critical acclaim and sometimes shocked the art world. Last publicly seen in 1996, Das letzte Selbstbildnis I (The last self-portrait I) comes from the Collection of Marcel Brient and shares the same intensity of one of Martin Kippenberger’s last self-portraits, Ohne Titel (aus der Serie Das Floß der Medusa), formerly part of the same visionary collection. 

Baselitz’s need to forge his own type of painting cannot be understood outside the context of Germany’s political and cultural landscape. Raised in the austerity of communist East Germany, the artist moved to West Germany before the building of the Berlin Wall. Far from the ethos of East Germany’s Social Realism, abstract expressionist styles and conceptual trends were dominating the West. Reluctant to both, Baselitz instead identified himself as an ‘outsider’, alongside artists and writers from northern Europe who similarly eschewed artistic movements or schools, and had lived disturbed or isolated lives at the edge of society. With his friend Eugen Schönebeck, he authored his Pandemonium Manifestos in 1961 and 1962, formulating this feeling of isolation he felt while trying to affirm his voice in the art world. The search for renewal on the basis of ‘outsider’ visions led Baselitz to take the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch as a key influence and inspiration. Finding a mutual interest in psychological mutilation, Baselitz was far less interested in the depictive functions of representation than with its power to symbolise states of feelings.

 

Baselitz’s great appreciation for Munch was further evidenced by the intensely rendered figures that dominated the artist’s output in 1982. By that time, Baselitz had introduced his characteristic symbol, the inverted image, adding a further layer to the portrayal of displacement in his paintings. With fiery and dramatic brushstrokes, Das letze Selbstbildnis I (The last self-portrait I) is a powerful example of the artist’s new approach that conveys a sense of isolation, anxiety and despair. Here, the upside-down figure, set in an unrecognisable environment, sharply stands out from the background and adopts an uncanny magical presence. With Baselitz’s frantic brushwork, his rough treatment of the flayed, solitary figure next to a window, and the identification of his surroundings as being plunged in the night time, the painting echoes the most compelling elements of Munch’s Self-Portrait-The Night Wanderer, 1923-24. The figure emerges from the darkness in a pose similar to that in Munch’s masterwork achieving a comparable intensity in the evocation of an exceptional mood. Further reminiscent of Munch’s triumphant use of red in Self-Portrait by the Window, circa 1940, Baselitz adds additional crusts to this depiction of total isolation by navigating the poles of abstraction and figuration. As remarked by Richard Calvocoressi, ‘The window is the perfect form, which can be read simultaneously as both abstract and representational’.ⁱ

 

With a volumetric and sculptural presence, the figure in the present work recalls Baselitz’s wood sculptures of the same period. Returning to sculpture for the first time since his period of intense involvement with it in the late 1970s, Baselitz mastered new painterly techniques which allowed him to achieve a new monumental quality in his work. Perhaps informed by this practice, and his enormous larger-than-life sculptures, the artist opted for colossal canvases which gave life to chaotic and stirring brushstrokes that transcend the laws of figuration. In the present work, the figure is delineated more than ever before. A dense, flaming impasto runs down the lengths of the canvas in tactile layers, while concentrated brushstrokes seem to sweep freely in some areas, and others follow the contours of the figure’s silhouette modeling the body like sculpture. There is a tenacious weightiness as the body appears hard and almost literally wooden. With an emphatic corporeality, Das letzte Selbstbildnis I (The last self-portrait I) is deliberately cruder than the artist’s earlier works and demonstrates the new heights that Baselitz’s art had reached in 1982.

 

The present canvas, in which the figure responds directly to Munch’s late self-portraits, confronts the viewer with a powerful depiction of alienation. Painted at the height of Baselitz’s career, the dynamism dominating the composition reflects Baselitz’s renewed mindset following the psycho-social trauma of the post-war period, and, as such, distinguishes the painting as one of the most important from the artist’s career.

 

Georg Baselitz on Edvard Munch

 

 

ⁱ Richard Calvocoressi, Georg Baselitz, London, 1982, n.p.