Are there any limits to art’s ability to transform? Not according to Georg Baselitz, the veteran German artist who has reworked the imagery from a set of 19th-century “erotic lithographs” that many might describe as pornography. For starters, he flips the pictures upside down – his habitual way of inverting reality. But that’s just the beginning. Baselitz unleashes a joyous arsenal of artistic ingenuity on these crude images of a couple making love, bringing both immense technical skill and witty conceptual brilliance to pictures that, through his eyes, become oddly moving.
This year Baselitz turned 85 and his birthday is being celebrated with exhibitions all over the world, from a show of his rough-hewn wooden sculptures at London’s Serpentine to new paintings of shamanistic half-stag, half-human figures that’s just opened in New York. He also took over Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum to celebrate its paintings of nudes. But if you still need converting to this unique artist’s humour and intensity (he proves they can go together), this provocative little show might be the best introduction of all.
Baselitz is a past master of outrage. He grew up under nazism until he was seven and was an adolescent in communist East Germany, where he learned to loathe authority. After crossing to the west, he kicked against conservatism there too. His first exhibition in West Berlin got raided and works were confiscated. His early masterpiece The Big Night Down the Drain depicts a grotesque youth playing with his stiff pink penis. This portrait of the artist as a young man might also serve as a portrait of the artist as the older man who, in 2002, created these steamed-up works.
A man and woman, respectably clad in old-fashioned suit and dress, grope and intertwine beside a discarded umbrella. Perhaps they went walking in the rain, a bourgeois outing in Sunday best, and stopped for a fumble in the bushes or sand dunes. She loosens her clothes to free her breasts, exposes a stockinged leg. The man, still in his suit, undoes his flies. But a white circle appears at the pivotal point of the images, partly hiding the conjunction of penis and vagina.
Is it self-censorship? Hardly. The white circle that appears in each of these scenes is more like an image of mystery. There’s a special secret inside this white hole. It’s an intervention of the abstract that allows Baselitz to stand back from his licentious images and keep his artistic cool.
This series of prints is called Belle Haleine, a readymade title taken from the inventor of the readymade, Marcel Duchamp. In 1920 Duchamp created a prototype of his own perfume, with a photo of his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy on the bottle, and called it Belle Haleine, Eau de Voilette (“Beautiful breath, veil water”). For Duchamp, eroticism is the art of delay, a cool-headed game of deferred desire.
But it is absolutely not delayed for Baselitz. His prints are stupendously, magnificently carnal, like Picasso on schnapps. The word “print” is potentially misleading, perhaps suggesting a small, dry image. In fact these works are huge, each more that 2 metres tall and inked all over in thick yet nuanced shades of black. Baselitz has printed these big sheets from linocuts that he incised spontaneously without any preparatory drawings, so these are vast freehand sketches that have come out as white lines in darkness.
Their sensuality doesn’t lie in their deliberately banal content – some very ordinary sex – but in the passion of his drawing. Every line is a white cut of emotion, thickening and narrowing, curving and convulsing against the black void. The couple, as they enthusiastically feel each other, are delineated with fierce, powerful graphic certainty that gives them a solid, hefty presence – their lovemaking is life itself, drawn in white light against the cold, empty, dark universe.
Baselitz is an authority on the history of printmaking. He has collected Renaissance chiaroscuro prints since he first made money from his own art. In chiaroscuro woodcuts, deep suggestive shadow is created by pools of ink on paper. He reinvents those techniques here to set the mystery of desire against the night of death.
Can pornography become art? It can when a true artist makes it. Despite the title, Baselitz is not paying homage to Duchamp. He’s immodestly triumphing over the French hero of cool irony. Hand-drawn, human art is magical, Baselitz suggests. It can raise baseness into the sublime and make us see the beauty of just being alive. This couple clumsily embracing are for Baselitz existential heroes.
• Georg Baselitz: Belle Haleine is at the Cristea Roberts Gallery, London, from 10 to 22 December. Georg Baselitz: Sculptures 2011-2015 is at the Serpentine, London, until 7 January.
