Georg Baselitz is talking about Tracey Emin. “She ate too much spaghetti at De Kooning’s restaurant,” says the German painter. I understand this as meaning her paintings are overly indebted to the abstract expressionist master.
“But he says it with admiration, yes?” explains the translator. “She has touched De Kooning. It’s joking, teasing her.”
This is typical of the way Baselitz talks: provocatively and paradoxically – but with humour and nuance that can be lost in translation. He actually finds Emin “fantastische, her way of intellectual expression, her existentialism – phenomenal”. And he is “full of admiration for how she deals with what’s happening to her right now”, referring to her recovery from squamous cell bladder cancer.
But Baselitz’s edgy remarks can sometimes get him into scrapes. In 2013, he was quoted in Der Spiegel as saying: “Women don’t paint very well.” A couple of years later, he doubled down on that, telling the Guardian: “The market doesn’t lie. Even though the painting classes in art academies are more than 90% made up by women, it’s a fact that very few of them succeed. It’s nothing to do with education, or chances, or male gallery owners. It’s to do with something else and it’s not my job to answer why it’s so. It doesn’t just apply to painting, either, but also music.”
These words have become a millstone. So. I wonder, has he changed his mind?
On the contrary. Baselitz believes he “never had another opinion” about women in art, other than the enthusiasm he has just expressed for Emin. He once happened to give “a provocative answer”. But he’s just made it clear how highly he regards Emin, and he feels the same about other great women artists throughout history: he “always found Artemisia much better than Orazio”. That is, he prefers the great baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi to her dad.
It’s not hard to understand why this artist enjoys his right to offend. Baselitz has lived under two dictatorships. He was born in 1938, was seven years old when the Third Reich ended, and found himself on the unfree side of the iron curtain in Stalinist East Germany. Since moving to the west in the 1950s he has stoked controversies about obscenity and the representation of nazism, and painted hilarious parodies of propaganda art in his Helden (Heroes) series. He’s since caught the nagging anxiety of middle class life in the affluent west with his upside-down paintings, where everything looks so nice and beautiful – except topsy-turvy.
We are discussing his current work, which is extraordinary. The idea that artists have a “late style” is a cliche: many just get tired and repeat themselves. But Baselitz in his 80s is having a fiery and ruthlessly expressive late flowering, honing what he calls his “existentialism” in works that capture how he feels in his body now. His Sofabilder (sofa pictures), which have just been on show at White Cube Hong Kong, are nudes of his wife Elke Kretzschmar, to whom he has been married since 1962. They depict her body as a wild dapple of milky daubs in the dark. But Baselitz keeps his artistic wildness in the studio: “My private life is very well organised,” he says. “Married 60 years, two sons.”
His raw paintings of old age include not just nudity but a series of disembodied hands that could be Nosferatu’s claws. I tell him that it was these images of human fragility that drew me deeper into his art. I mean this as praise, but far from lapping it up he puts me on the spot with a question: “Would you agree that it needed the time from the beginning to now to get to this point? Or do you think it could have gone faster?”
That is, if I so like his vulnerable paintings of the 21st century, is his earlier career a mere detour? Should he have found this stark truth sooner? It’s quite a thought about a career that emerged from the ashes of postwar Germany and helped resurrect an entire culture.
Hans-Georg Kern was born in the small rural community of Deutschbaselitz – whose name he later took – in 1938. As a child he lived under the Third Reich. Then Deutschbaselitz became part of the Soviet bloc German Democratic Republic (GDR). Communist official art, he found as he went to art school, was dishonest and dead. “In the GDR or in the Nazi time, all artists were state artists,” he says. “You can see it in the results. You are born into this situation.”
He talks about a narrow, closed view of the world in which a contempt for America – the home of “degenerate” jazz for the Nazis, the capitalist enemy for the GDR – was a constant. “Until I was about 20 years old I did not know there was something like culture in the United States. Based on the information I got from my father and the society around my parents, Americans were funny people. They had no culture and no art, only good weapons. Then I saw the New American Painting exhibition in 1958 from Pollock and his school, and it was like somebody beat me on the head with a big baseball bat. I suddenly learned that Americans did not only have the best weapons: they also had the best painters.”
This was soon after he crossed from East Berlin – where he’d been thrown out of art school for “sociopolitical immaturity” – to the city’s western sector. He wasn’t naive about why abstract expressionist art was on view in West Germany: “It was a pure ideological exhibition. The CIA financed it. And it was the best in art you could see at that time.”
It blew his mind but he didn’t respond by “walking alongside the Americans, like a child with its mother”. Instead he decided: “I’m going to do exactly the opposite, and I will go back to my German history.” This is the crux of West Germany’s artistic miracle after the second world war. From an embittered British perspective, the prosperous Germans were now Europe’s Americans – all big cars and boring cities. They also had the best artists and film-makers. The likes of Baselitz, Josef Beuys, Anselm Kiefer and Werner Herzog refounded German art by recovering its most romantic, sublime traditions – something you might have thought had been rendered irredeemably toxic by Hitler.
Yet Baselitz’s Germanness is profoundly ambivalent. When I ask what made postwar German art so original, he says it was being born into a wasteland: “If you have just inherited crap and bullshit, you have to run much faster than all the others. You have no time to think. All your decisions are made on impulse.”
Baselitz, whose six decades in art are celebrated in a monumental new Taschen book, exposed the underlying conservatism of a supposedly free West Germany with his first exhibition in 1963. It included a painting of a stunted figure in military shorts, hair plastered flat on his head Hitler-style, holding a stiff purple penis in his hand, masturbating. It’s called The Big Night Down the Drain. The police raided the gallery and confiscated this and another painting.
In my essay in the Taschen book, I argue that young Baselitz was making entartete kunst, “degenerate art”, deliberately invoking the German and international modern artists who were given this label by the Nazis. Now Baselitz tells me that being a “degenerate” artist outside society, opposed to authority, has always been what defines German art. He obviously speaks from personal experience as a living witness of both the GDR and Third Reich, yet he’s also thinking on a bigger timeline when he mentions Kaiser Wilhelm: “German society always in history was not very free. It’s never been democratic.”
That includes the present day, too: Baselitz claims modern German “democracy” has its own deep conformism that can kill art. The only way to resist is to be your own art dictator: “Art must be dominating. The artist has to behave as if he himself is the only potential intellectual power: all others around him are stupid. So that a democrat, a chancellor or finance minister or whatever, becomes angry and nervous about what the artist is saying.”
When Baselitz and Anselm Kiefer shared the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1980 – exploiting its Third Reich architecture with its overdoor inscription GERMANIA and tackling their history in such works as Baselitz’s carved wooden figure apparently making a Nazi salute – they were accused by some of flirting with fascism. In reality, of course, they were killing taboos on talking about the 20th century’s horrors, and finding a visual language to address the ashes.
Besides, Baselitz is no dictator, as I find when he suddenly wonders aloud about the value of his whole life’s work. What he is is an artist with a keen knowledge of German history, one who has spent a lifetime finding a visual language to address the ashes.
• Baselitz XXL Collector’s Edition is published by Taschen.
