The present work expands on many of the pictorial strategies frst introduced in his seminal Orange Eaters and Glass Drinkers series from 1981, where the full-length fgures of his earlier paintings were replaced with thickly painted subjects truncated at the waist in a searing palette of yellows and oranges. While the chromatic palette paid homage to the Fauvists, this cruder style of fguration referred back to the history of German Expressionism, particularly that of the Die Brücke movement, but also to the existential paintings of Edvard Munch. As art critic John Russell remarked on related paintings that debuted in New York in 1983, “they have something of [Ernst Ludwig] Kirchner’s direct and unsparing approach to the human body in movement and something of the chromatic wildness of [Erich] Heckel, and yet they are pure Baselitz” (John Russell, “Georg Baselitz and his Upside-Downs”, The New York Times, April 8, 1983, online).
Georg Baselitz, Dresdner Frauen-Karla, 1990. Private Collection, Image Jochen Littkemann, Artwork © 2018 Georg Baselitz
Since the late 1960s, Baselitz has sought to “liberate representation from content”, inverting his image as a means to prompt the viewer to see the picture as a painted surface, rather than an illusionistic space of representational subject matter (Georg Baselitz, quoted in Georg Baselitz, exh. cat., Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1995, p. 71). While Schwarze Säule pushes his representational subject matter into abstraction, at the same time, it exerts an intense emotional presence that vividly illustrates Baselitz’s radically new approach to the fgure. As Andreas Franzke observed, “isolated and set down like alien beings in an environment of which we are told virtually nothing, these fgures convey an overwhelming sense of psychological tension. Here, the actual application of the paint…plays the dominant role, conveying the efect with extraordinary impact” (Andreas Franzke, Georg Baselitz, Munich, 1989, p. 169).
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Entitled “black column” and characterized by a solidity of form, the present work unmistakably recalls Baselitz’s wood sculptures of the same period. Having created his frst major sculpture Modell für eine Skulptur, for the West German pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1980, Baselitz between 1982 and the spring of 1983 conceived a group of upright fgures and heads. Modulated with a chainsaw and axe from a single tree trunk, Baselitz’s sculptures are scarred yet defant, imperfect yet resilient. Like the carved contours of these wooden sculptures, the fgure in the present work bears the bold, incisive gestures of the artist’s hand. Imbued with a sense of weight, the fgure is roughly modulated with directional brushstrokes that give it a varied and chiseled tactility reminiscent of the irregular exteriors of Baselitz’s contemporaneous sculpture. Seemingly carved from a “black column” of paint, Schwarze Säule, with its elongated yellow idol-like fgure, vividly anticipates the yellow-painted Dresdener Frauen sculptures the artist would create some fve years later between 1989 and 1990 as a commemoration to the destruction of Dresden at the end of World War II. As such, Schwarze Säule powerfully exemplifes how Baselitz’s radical sculptural explorations pushed his painterly idiom to new levels of ambition.
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