Beaubourg devotes a retrospective, which accuses some shortcomings, to the German painter born in 1938, whose visual and emotional power does not weaken.
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In a few decades, when will begin to write a complete history of creation in the last decades of the XX e century and the first of the XXI e , Georg Baselitz will appear as a mischievous case for which will want to proceed by movements and categories. The visual and emotional power of its paintings, sculptures and graphic works will also be obvious and irresistible as today. There is little doubt that we will always be so rudely shaken, and even hurt, by its flagging body representations, its heads with exorbitants and glaring mouths.
In the retrospective that stands in Beaubourg, the test is repeated regularly, regardless of the dates of the works, subjects and stylistic ways. Words as galvailable as magnetism is needed for lack of better. In all its exhibitions – there have been many in Europe for twenty years – the phenomenon is satisfied, and its violence does not weaken.
So there is a very great artist, one of the greatest current. And this man performs a work away, which can not be compared to any other today. Among his contemporaries, Baselitz is alone, including among his German contemporaries of primary importance – Gerhard Richter (born in 1932) and Sigmar Polke (1941-2010), who can be enrolled in Pop Art because they are manipulators of Images already there. He, no. He brought them from you do not know where. He is alone, as were, in their time, Alberto Giacometti and Francis Bacon: unruly attached to the human figure, painting and sculpture, and indifferent to the modes and movements of their time. They are therefore not ranked.
Scandalous debut
To measure the Singularity of Baselitz, it takes the story. Born under the name of Hans-Georg Kern, in 1938, in the village of Deutschbaselitz, near Dresden, he is a child at the time of destruction of the city, bombed in February 1945. He sees the ruins shortly after, and lives , still a child, the collapse of the III e reich. He is a teenager in the Democratic Republic of Germany, under Soviet domination, and pupils at the School of Fine Arts of Berlin-East in 1956. It is expelled the following year, because his work bear the brand of Picasso, whose socialist realism has horror. He passes the border between the two halves of the city and is admitted to the fine arts of Berlin, the west side.
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