Georg Baselitz likes drawing dicks, doesn’t he? Men with their dicks out. Brendan Behan with his big dick out. Brendan Behan with his little dick out. An unidentified pervert with his dick. A scrawled, but identifiable, Hitler with his dick out. Lots of dicks, then.
His show at the RA contains all these dicks, and much else besides.
He’s from East Germany, and the communist opression of his early years might account for the welter of flagrant sexuality, disability and exhibitionism on display, all classed as perverse under the post-war regime. His career breaks down into remarkably strong themes, and Baselitz explored and developed each in great detail. Here we have groupings of pandemonium, inversions, fragmentation. There are also common threads through all his work – alienation, mutation, and the horror of war. Also, a minor point, nearly all his frames for the first twenty years of his career are exactly the same size. A uniformity enforced, perhaps, by the austere environment of postwar Germany?
In the ‘inversions’ section, Baselitz attempts to subvert the very essence of painting by producing and/or framing his work upside down. An interesting idea. But if you don’t agree with his premise, or even find it aesthetically pleasing, you won’t get far with it.
Probably the best painting here is the blood red version of “Oberon”, a genuinely eerie piece where the viewer comes under the inspection of four dead-eyed, ghostly aliens. It really feels like you are on the operating table, and it has echoes of illicit Nazi experimentation. It will give you the fear.
Interesingly, and exeptionally, Baselitz’s later work is his most interesting. Here it comes under the category of “remixes”, and it’s a suitable analogy. It is incredibly hard for an artist to appraise their own canon, but he has been able to detach himself enough to select a series of motifs which he then takes forward with new work, and a new style. With increased use of pen and ink, and starker, white backgrounds, this later work is the most iconic of his career. Feet, eagles, Hitler, dicks and upside down framing all occur again and again here. While the subject matter is not new, it shows an intelligent and accurate summation of his life’s work and is a valid addition.
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