George Baselitz: Coming to Terms…

George Baselitz - Georg Baselitz - Dresdner Frauen-Karla - 1990 - Wood and tempera - Staatliche Kunstsammlungen (click photo for larger image)German artist George Baselitz (born 1938) was enormously influential in showing a generation of German artists (and people) how they might come to terms with issues of art and national identity, in the wake of the Second World War. 

Briefly trained in the officially sanctioned social realism of Communist East Berlin, he soon moved to West Berlin and encountered abstract art. Ultimately, however, he was to reject both approaches. At a time when others turned to Conceptual art, Pop Art, and Arte Povera (“poor art”) a return to simple objects and messages, Baselitz revived the German Expressionism that had been denounced by the Nazis, and returned the human figure to a central position in painting.

Working in nearly every artistic medium, Baselitz has established himself as a visual artist of international stature. His work confronts the gut realities of history, and the tragedy of being German in a post World War II era. He was best known for his inverted, or upside-down paintings that shift emphasis from subject to the properties of painting itself, creating not just a painted canvas, but a nearly sculptural object. The anamorphic quality of his heroic and rebellious figures has had a powerful and international influence on Neo-Expressionist artists.

The work featured here is one of a series of eleven monumental sculptural busts of women, which commemorate the destruction of Dresden at the end of World War II. Baselitz grew up not far from the city, and remembered its destruction vividly. He wanted to pay homage to what he called the "rubble women," who he believed embodied the reconstruction efforts of a broken city. The rough portrayal but penetrating gaze of the figure suggest a person terribly scarred by war, but simultaneously defiant and determined to survive it.