Genius Down the Drain: Georg Baselitz as a Painter Excerpt from the essay by Jonathan Jones
Opposite: Der Dichter, 1965. Oil on canvas. Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin.
The wizened dwarf holds his Pinocchio nose of a male member in both hands. Clad in black shorts, he has a skull behind his bare legs, drawn in harsh black lines, a death’s head from a Renaissance print. Another incised skull hangs above his face. That face itself is an unmistakable caricature. A small square moustache. Flat black hair with a side parting. A face from the past. Remix im Eimer (Remix down the Drain, 2007) belongs to a series of works painted by Georg Baselitz in the early years of the twenty-first century that revisit some of his paintings from the mid to late twentieth. In it he plays with a picture that got him in trouble in West Berlin in 1963, when Galerie Werner & Katz staged his first solo exhibition. Die große Nacht im Eimer (The Big Night down the Drain), a meaty, mottled figure, hewn out of darkness, of a hydrocephalic, dead-eyed, masturbating youth in military-looking shorts was confiscated by the police, along with Der nackte Mann (The Naked Man), in which a rotting corpse on a table has a huge erection even as all its other flesh collapses into yellow pus and exposed viscera. What did these furious, horrible, hilarious paintings look like in the early 1960s? They were let loose on a West Germany still dominated by a generation shaped by Nazism and the war, where capitalist economic discipline and a mix of conformism and hypocrisy muffled dissent. To those who were shocked and scandalized they were nothing but obscene chaos. The police, to judge from their censorship of Baselitz’s show, saw some kind of decadent pornography posing as “art.” Degenerate art, even.
Georg Baselitz in his studio, Schloss Derneburg, 1984. Photo: © Daniel Blau. 24
TASCHEN MAGAZINE
Previous spread: Nachtessen in Dresden, 1983. Oil on canvas. Photo: © Kunsthaus Zürich, 1991. 25