Georg Baselitz – no creation without destruction…

Born in Saxony in 1938 on the eve of WWII, Georg Baselitz became one of Germany’s greatest Contemporary artists. Né Hans Georg Kern, he adopted the name Baselitz after the Saxon village where he was born (Deutschbaselitz). Originally a painter and an engraver, and later in life a creator of radical sculptures, Baselitz belonged to a generation of artists like Markus Lüpertz, Jörg Immendorf and Anselm Kiefer who rejected the aesthetic norms of the 60s avant-garde.

After a somewhat chaotic art student period during which he was refused entry into the Dresden school of Fine Art in 1955 and was thrown out of the East Berlin Higher School of Visual arts for “a lack of socio-political maturity”, Georg BASELITZ’s pictorial work had a strong and polemical impact on the German cultural scene in the mid-60s. He continued his art studies in West Berlin where he absorbed the theories of Wassily Kandinsky and Kasimir Malevitch, as well as of major Contemporary American artists like Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston, and then travelled to Amsterdam, Cassel and Paris. In 1961, the year the Berlin wall was erected, he adopted his pseudonym and drafted his first manifesto, Pandemonium, strongly influenced by Antonin Artaud, who was obsessed with decadence. His early works were also manifestos, produced in an “Expressionist” tradition with a powerful emotional charge. The works seem to draw on art produced by the “mentally ill”… Dubuffet, Fautrier, Munch, Nolde and Steinberg… in short, they showed strong affinities with non-conformists.

In 1963, at the Werner & Katz Gallery in Berlin, Georg Baselitz mounted his first solo exhibition which caused a scandal. Two of the works, Die Großer Nacht im Eimer – representing a boy masturbating – and Nackter Mann (Naked man) were banned and confiscated for causing public outrage. Baselitz appears to have achieved exactly what he was trying to achieve, i.e. to defy the authorities and the general public with a new and provocative style of painting. The confiscated paintings were returned to him two years later. Today they are considered to among the most important paintings of the post-war period, and the boy masturbating painting is one of the most prized possessions of the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. Indeed, Baselitz’s works from this period are the most sought-after by collectors. In 2011, Sotheby’s offered a smaller version of the Die Großer Nacht im Eimer from the Christian Duerckheim-Ketelho collection. Under the title Grosse Nacht, the work carried a high estimate of over $3 million and represented the same onanist subject as the painting confiscated by the authorities in 1963 (which Baselitz considers his “first attempt at painting”). The work’s presentation at auction was an event in itself and it was finally hammered at 3.3 million dollars (over 3.8 million dollars including fees). However, Grosse Nacht was not the only rare work in that sale (29 June 2011) and Sotheby’s managed to sell Baselitz’s Spekulatius for the even better price of 3.1 million euros (3.6 million euros including fees) setting a new auction record for the artist. In fact Sotheby’s sold nine Baselitz works that day, each one for over a million dollars, generating a total of 19.7 million dollars. That is roughly three times the total usually generated by that type of sale.

At the end of the 1960s, Baselitz overturned the human figure with heads painted upside down. This figurative “overturning” seemed to have been a new strategy designed to allow the paintings to “speak more for themselves”. After all, it was Wassily Kandisky who confessed that his inspiration to create abstract art – which subsequently injected a whole new dynamic into Western painting – came from seeing one of his own paintings upside-down in his studio… The overturning of artistic codes thus emerged as a new path for a deeper exploration of the visible. And so began a new period of Baselitz’s career – one that is equally popular on the art market – considered typical of the artist’s oeuvre. Nowadays it is difficult to obtain a small Baselitz painting for less than $100,000 (it was already difficult in the 1980s). However, some works on paper with upside-down heads are occasionally offered for around $10,000, and his latest drawings to be offered at auctions sold for between $15,000 and $55,000. In terms of transactions, his market consists of 34% canvases and drawings and 65% engravings. His sculptures are much rarer, primarily because it was an activity that the artist did not commence until his forties.

Baselitz the sculptor
“Baselitz Sculpteur” was the title of a major exhibition organised by the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 2011, a title reflecting both the predominance of the medium in his later work and its independence vis-à-vis his other work. In his three-dimensional work, Baselitz liked working with wood in a relatively physical activity involving axes and chainsaws. A direct cut, a radical act, that allowed him to get to the essential. The initial reception of these works on the international scene was somewhat mixed: his first sculpture, a 1979 piece entitled Modell für eine Skulptur (Model for a sculpture) was presented at the German pavilion of the Venice Biennial in 1980 where it sparked a lively controversy. It wasn’t so much the subject that upset viewers (the human figure emerging from the block of material reminds us of unfinished works by Miguel-Angelo or Rodin), but the fact that the artist was expected to present his famous painted heads, instead of which he surprised the public with a first sculpture that smacked of brutality and independence vis-à-vis the Contemporary art that was being produced at the time. In so doing, Baselitz appears to have satisfied his desire to be different. He subsequently pursued this “archaic sculptural” path and in the 1980s produced head and standing figures that looked like tribal totem figures, painted with minimal colours. Today these pieces are almost never offered for sale, and when they are, they go immediately for between $600,000 and $1.4 million.

Over the last decade the Noack foundry has been casting a limited number of bronze versions of these wooden sculptures. The last two bronzes offered at auction in 2008 were both bought in despite being priced substantially cheaper than their wooden counterparts (the rare bronzes sold have fetched between $50,000 and $150, 000 on average).

Nowadays, a safe bet on the art market, Baselitz’s price index grows without speculation (+58% over the past decade) and he remains a “major” signature that is particularly accessible thanks to his engravings. Despite his status as a market heavyweight with works that fetch millions, half of Baselitz’s works sell for around $2,000 thanks to his production of multiples that account for more than 65% of his global market.

The best place to acquire a work by Baselitz is the UK which accounts for 59% of all transactions on the artist’s work. Moreover, in 2014 London has hosted three exhibitions dedicated to his work: one at the Gagosian (Farewell Bill), one at the Royal Academy of Arts (Renaissance Impressions) and one at the British Museum (Germany divided: Baselitz and its generation).