In the precision of its formulation, the exhibition title has something of the powerfully resolute brushstrokes of the painter Georg Baselitz: “The Retrospective” Punkt. End. Curated by the former director of the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Center Pompidou, Bernard Blistène. Baselitz has been present in Paris for several years, not least thanks to the tireless efforts of the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery. But now he is being honored several times. The Académie des Beaux-Arts, one of the five academies in the Institut de France alongside the Académie française, has accepted him as a foreign member. For the first time since the 19th century a German painter is sitting in the circle of men in green coat and a few women under the golden dome. A strange sight to see him, who in his inaugural address appealed to the artist’s absolute freedom vis-à-vis institutions, to see him swinging the academic sword. He seems to have left all his creative rage outside on the forecourt of the institute, where until the end of the retrospective in the Center Pompidou his monumental sculpture “Zero Dom” – a “House of Anger” he called it in the speech – to the Louvre on the other Seine -Ways across the bank.
You have to hang it cleverly, because only a few monumental objects fit into a room
The chronologically structured show of the Center Pompidou – after that by Anselm Kiefer five years ago, the second major retrospective of this house for a German contemporary artist – puts Baselitz’s work in the historical-political context of its time: destroyed landscape and society after the war, rebellion against the commandments of socialist realism in the GDR as well as later against the political-aesthetic taboos of the Federal Republic in West Berlin, search for new forms of perception without canonical regulations, return of childhood memories in Dresden after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, ongoing revision of the motifs already dealt with since 2005 in the “Remix” cycles.
“Anxiety I (Korzhev)” from 1999.
(Photo: Georg Baselitz 2021, Jochen Littkemann, Berlin)
The spatial requirements for Baselitz’s large-format pictures and sculptures mean that the constant transformation of this work on its own traces – trees, animals, dismembered human bodies – cannot be represented in the fluctuating back and forth of the examples, but like comet impacts only in compact individual pieces. More than half a dozen of these monumental objects do not fit in one room. So, apart from a few cabinet dreams with drawings and prints, and the fleshy, swelling foot-torso pictures from the early 1960s that are effectively lined up on a wall, one can hardly see at a glance the infinite abundance of variations of this artist behind the seemingly pounded finality of his works. That requires a wise selection and hanging of the pictures. This has been achieved in the spacious, open sequence of rooms at the Center Pompidou.
The private mythology of the young Baselitz already in the titles gradually dissolves as the halls progress. In 1963, “Oberon” was the name of a turning-neck bouquet that lolled eerily in front of a field of rubble. “The great friends” was the title of two giants in dirty harlequin rags in front of a landscape of ruins from the “Heroes” series. In 1963 the artist called the scandalous picture of a monstrous boy with a priapic limb sticking out of his pants, as if something from the recent past had still not come to rest as “the whole night in the bucket”. The reference to Germany at the time of zero is never penetrating in this show. The artist who emerged from the war and the divided nation is nowhere contextualistically deciphered.
“Le Monde” asks whether Baselitz is simply “too big” for the Pompidou
How efficiently this hard worker destroys the superficially depicted reality in his pictures with a chisel, brush or directly with his finger can be seen at every turn in the exhibition. He, who was drawn to Antonin Artaud’s burlesque magic early on and likes to mix the sublime with the grotesque, began in the late 1960s with a wild determination to turn the world upside down. This banal and ingenious process of inverting images between above and below, which seeks to cut the connection between motif and representation, is illustrated in the Center Pompidou with a few cleverly selected examples. With the “eagle” painted with the finger in 1972, it remains open whether the animal is in flight for prey, in a fall or already on the way to the other side of the objectivity With the head down, one thing is clear: that the triangular wing between the arm and trunk of the male nude is no longer needed for flying. And in front of the picture “The Girls from Olmo II” one realizes exactly that process of perception by recognizing the bright green shapes at the upper edge of the picture only when looking a second time as bicycles on which the two girls are riding their heads down through the yellow landscape once again, who always fascinated Baselitz about the objects in his African art collection: seeing the world as if it were breaking out of its origins anew every day. No academic principle, nowhere.
This choleric art hurts and overwhelms the museums, writes the critic of Le Monde about the exhibition: “Is Baselitz too big for the Center Pompidou?” In any case, it is strange that the department headings such as “Between abstraction and figuration”, “Beyond abstraction”, “Zeitgeist” bring the artist back into the old art-historical categories, as if one had given in to one’s own apodictic boldness at the Center Pompidou.
Baselitz. La Rétrospective. Center Pompidou, Paris. Until March 7, 2022. Catalog 45, – Euro.