Baselitz Black Or History As Background

Baselitz Black or History as Background John-Paul Stonard 28 EVERY SUNDAY MORNING in Deutschbaselitz, a small village in Saxony, the young people and children, no more than thirty, would congregate on the village square. The boys sat on a wooden fence and watched the girls walk up and down, arm in arm. They wore the uniform of the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel [League of German Girls], the girls’ branch of the Hitler-Jugend, the youth organisation that played such an important role in Nazi Germany. From the beginning of the 1930s, local chapters of the BDM met throughout Germany for camping, singing, and to play sports – and of course to sing the praises of their leader, Adolf Hitler. In the small town of Deutschbaselitz, the six year old Hans-Georg Kern (who later took the name Georg Baselitz) sat with his friends on the fence by the side of the road, watching the Hitler Girls walk gaily up and down, arm in arm. Seventy years later, the memory of these young girls resurfaces in the sculpture BDM Gruppe, 2012. The girls stand arm in arm, animated but mute. Ungainly limbs bend unnaturally to interlock, large heavy heads balance on awkward bodies. They are anonymous, and would be androgynous were it not for their oversized clumsy high-heeled shoes. The subject, a group of young girls, evokes a light-hearted gaiety, yet nothing in these harsh carved surfaces, wrought with deep cuts and rough planes, speaks of carefree emo- tion. If these were three village beauties remembered from Baselitz’s child- hood, they could not be further from the Three Graces of antiquity, shown most famously in smooth white marble by Canova, or with classical restraint by Raphael.1 So much has been lost or transfigured. What has survived, from a memory that must have been filtered a thousand times, is the motif of the linked arms. Not hands held, but arms linked; a rare motif in the history of art; one thinks perhaps only of Tobias and the Angel, and then only in painting.2 Canova’s Three Graces embrace one another with full-armed sensual intimacy. Linked arms are a more sober gesture of solidarity and friendship, a sense of common belonging – which in the case of the BDM girls can only appear now, with the benefit of hindsight, as a matter of extreme pathos. Their solidarity has been undone. The linked arms, like Auguste Rodin Le Penseur, Der Denker, The Thinker, 1903 their awkward bodies, have become a crude, unnatural gesture, emptied of Bronze, 180 x 98 x 145 cm, 70.9 x 38.6 x 57.1 in. any meaning. The light-skinned BDM girls wore white tops for their sporting © William Dudziak, http://www.dudziak.com events. Like the blackened, chopped surfaces, everything here seems to have been inverted, turned upside down, from light to dark, smooth to rough. Black surfaces have become essential in Baselitz’s recent painting and sculpture. He has described the coal-black patina used for his cast bronze sculpture as a means of creating a more neutral, less painterly appearance for his figures; more classical, perhaps. Neutral black might be seen as a way of tempering, or containing the feeling of violence on which much of his work, since the early days, has been based. From one of his first wood carvings, Modell für eine Skulptur [Model for a Sculpture], made in 1979 and displayed the next year at Venice, Baselitz used a variety of heavy-duty implements to hack and gouge forms from large blocks of limewood, with no attempt to ‘fin- ish’ or smooth over the coarse surface. Black and red tempera daubed onto the surface heightens the sense of a murder scene, evidence of a moment of violence. Hand tools were soon joined by a chainsaw, creating a more startling mechanical effect, for example in the 1987 G.-Kopf, with its grid-like surface lacerations. In the series of large heads Dresdner Frauen [Women of Dresden], begun in 1989, Baselitz wields the chainsaw as though it were a drawing tool, etching into the surface so that it becomes a vehicle for pathos, a lyrical expression of violence and suffering. In more recent sculptures, crudely carved, blocky forms, often adorned with a single mark of paint, cut Georg Baselitz and scored surfaces form a kind of folk Brutalism, a violent drama of surface Volk Ding Zero – Folk Thing Zero, 2009 that implies an even more violent, disturbed interior. Bronze et peinture à l’huile Bronzeguss und Ölfarbe Cast bronze and oil paint The soft black surfaces of BDM Gruppe seem an effort to rein in some of this 308 x 117 x 120 cm, 121.25 x 46 x 47.25 in. Photo: Ulrich Ghezzi violence, or at least to put it in the realm of memory, rather than action. The texture of the broad swirling grain of the wood, patinated and waxed, takes on the appearance of lusciously brushed paint. We might also think of it as burnt, or charred wood (in which case it is worth noting that carbonising the surface of wood has been a traditional way of preserving it against rot and, paradoxically, combustion). There is after all something beautiful in these girls, the beginnings of a contest of graces. The same might be said for Sing Sang Zero (2011), two standing figures who seem to be emerging, decrepit, from a complicated past. The classicising impulse brings to mind historical precedents. Deep black patinas were used on Venetian bronzes in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies, and acted as a form of protection against the humid, salty atmosphere of the lagoon. Black patinas were popular during the nineteenth century, as a way of providing a uniform, simplified look to collections of bronzes from different times, but also to approximate a more antique appearance, which might even be traced back to Roman art, and the ‘Herculaneum black’ of bronze sculpture unearthed in Southern Italy in the eighteenth century. Rodin used a rich dark surface to create a sense of depth and drama, inten- sifying outline and modelling. The black surface gives his work a sense of grandeur and seriousness that can equally be read in the case of the BDM girls – with the qualification that where Rodin’s drama was based on re- flected light and startling highlights, Baselitz’s unreflective surfaces betray the light-absorbing wood from which they were originally carved; memory falls into them, rather than drama out of them. BDM Gruppe is one of a group of recent works that combine historical and personal themes with a new range of sculptural ideas and modes of presen- tation, not least the use of a deep black patina. The crudely-carved, unre- fined forms might at first sight seem like monumental folk art – or ‘Pop folk art’ – but the range of personal associations and the interrelation of the figures create a depth of meaning that takes these works far from the world of carved and painted toys, religious charms or makeshift fetishes. The point can be made by turning from BDM Gruppe to a sculpture made a few years earlier, Volk Ding Zero – Folk Thing Zero (2009). A roughly-carved blocky figure, wearing an oversized cap and ridiculous high heels, sits in the pose of Rodin’s Thinker (a sculpture that Baselitz has said that he does not Georg Baselitz 3 Meine neue Mütze, 2003 like at all – “too much Michelangelo” ). His thoughts, however, could not be Bois de cèdre et peinture à l’huile less philosophical, if indeed he is thinking at all. The dunce’s note pinned to Zedernholz und Ölfarbe Cedar wood and oil paint his cap tells us as much: there is zero going on up there. A similar figure 310,5 x 83,5 x 107 cm, 122.3 x 32.8 x 42 in. Photo: Jochen Littkemann, Berlin appeared in the 2003 cedar-wood figure Meine neue Mütze [My new cap], and reappears in the double portrait Sing Sang Zero. Perhaps this is what it is like to make art, to empty yourself out, to think Zero, or rather not to think, to be thought. The wooden splint jutting out from the figure’s shorts suggests that erotic thoughts might well be high on the list of involuntary musings. The historical background goes a little deeper: the cap worn by the figure in Meine Neue Mütze is taken from a photograph of a war veteran who claims to have unearthed a ‘Pimpf’ cap, of a type worn by the ‘Pimpfe’, the youngest section of the Hitler Youth, aged from ten to fourteen. Membership of the Hitler Youth was compulsory after 1939. As a child Hans-Georg Kern would have liked to be a Pimpf4, but in 1944 he was too young as he sat on the fence watching the girls go by, arm in arm. History – difficult history – is ever-present as background. Yet the sculpture exists as an object in the present, and is more than a simple memorial. Volk Ding Zero might also be seen as what art historians are fond of calling a ‘transitional work’. It stands between Baselitz’s earlier wood carvings and his turn to foundry casting in bronze. The first, Pace Piece, a cast in bronze of a lime-wood carving of a single leg up to the knee, was made in 2003. Volk Ding Zero is a transition in that it appears to have been made from wood, but is in fact bronze.

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